The second half of the eleventh episode is up for your listening pleasure! In this episode, we talk to the Steelers' SBNation lead editor, Neal Coolong, about the Steelers and what to expect from Ben Roethlisberger, Troy Palomalu and company.
Neal lives in Minnesota!
Episode Notes:
- For the Number of the Week, we talked about defensive line pressure vs. sacks. One good measure is Pass Rusher Productivity, which combines sacks, hits and hurries (and weights them) to produce an efficiency metric for a pass-rusher. It has a limited use value, but is interesting nevertheless. In Week One, Brian Robison finished with the third-most total pressures of any pass-rusher and ranked 10th in PRP (Allen ranked 28th). In Week Two, Robison and Allen finished 10th and 11th, respectively, and had the 5th and 7th-most pressures. In Week Three, they dropped off the map (25th and 42nd).
- If you want a primer on the zone blitz, check out this excellent Grantland piece that details the zone blitz, its history and its evolution. Below, I'll embed a video about the pattern-matching concepts that's also found at the bottom of that Grantland piece.
- If you want to hear Steelers fans lament the Todd Haley offense (an amorphous title that actually doesn't signify any particular offense), check this out.
- PFF argues that Felix Jones and Jonathan Dwyer are equally "elusive," which is as elusive as Reggie Bush has been this year. Of course the numbers are skewed; they've combined for 30 total rushing attempts. Last year, Dwyer was not very elusive, according to their data.
- We talked about the William Gay play with Adrian Peterson in the podcast. Do you remember it? So do the Steelers, who were kind enough to talk about it.
- We talked about the age of the Steelers defense. Adjusting for the number of snaps everyone took, the Steelers defense was the oldest in the NFL last year.
- The Steelers are dominating the league in average yards allowed per kickoff return at 12.7. The Steelers rank first in this. Who ranks last? The Vikings, at 41.3.
- The Steelers have also had the highest percentage of their kicks returned.
Oh, here's that hit, to refresh your memory:
Hehehe.
The age of the Steelers (like any team) has been variable over the course of 2012:
More about matchup zones, using the Seam-Curl-Flat progression:
SCIF Fire Zone (via Smart Football)
Check out the Steelers SBNation blog, Behind the Steel Curtain.
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Once again, contact me at arifmhasan (at) gmail dot com or the podcast at NorseCodePodcast (at) gmail dot com. Follow us on twitter at @NorseCodeDN or just me at @ArifHasanDN.