Fourth & Why @FourthAndWhy

@NateGearySports If Coen can’t use him I have little faith he’d be good with anyone else. Depends on comp maybe. Not giving up more than a 3rd

@revonthemic @nickschupak Based on the analysis from the Cover1 team too it feels like maybe some miscommunication and scheme understanding gaps are happening.

@AaronQuinn716 By Thursday I’ve moved on. Still like discourse from the previous week but the outcome is the outcome. How does it correlate, if at all, to the coming weeks ahead.

@MarkZuck5272 @nickschupak Probably the best WR to take advantage of it too

@TheBillsGuys Yeah I looked into this too because watching the game this weekend I was thinking, “man this seems so much worse than last year.”

@TheBillsGuys Seems more like we have a bunch of guys that are good at one thing and we lack a guy that can do everything.

@throwthedamball

@throwthedamball Funny, all three Bills WRs here sit left of the separation line, yet Buffalo is 2nd in pass EPA/play. In plain English: Allen rarely throws into tight coverage (10.9% of attempts, 32nd of 37 QBs). They don't get open every route, but he finds them when they are.

@cookedbyshakir A departure from what we saw last year, that’s for sure.

Fourth & Why @FourthAndWhy

2 days ago

Watching the Rams game, it felt like every short throw was open. Stafford completed 40 of 54, and more than half of LA's receiving yards came after the catch. I wanted to know if that was one game or a pattern, so I compared where teams are throwing on Buffalo this year to last

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@GregTompsett I had to take a look myself. Felt like such a departure from last year.

Fourth & Why @FourthAndWhy

2 days ago

Watching the Rams game, it felt like every short throw was open. Stafford completed 40 of 54, and more than half of LA's receiving yards came after the catch. I wanted to know if that was one game or a pattern, so I compared where teams are throwing on Buffalo this year to last

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@KevinMassare It was always going to be a year of transition but I didn’t this the personnel issues were going to be this bad…x.com/fourthandwhy/s…

Fourth & Why @FourthAndWhy

2 days ago

Watching the Rams game, it felt like every short throw was open. Stafford completed 40 of 54, and more than half of LA's receiving yards came after the catch. I wanted to know if that was one game or a pattern, so I compared where teams are throwing on Buffalo this year to last

0 0 0 439 0

Watching the Rams game, it felt like every short throw was open. Stafford completed 40 of 54, and more than half of LA's receiving yards came after the catch. I wanted to know if that was one game or a pattern, so I compared where teams are throwing on Buffalo this year to last year. Five games in, it looks like a pattern. • Short middle: 2nd-best in the NFL in 2025, 28th now • Short right: 66.0% completed last year, 78.6% this year • Deep throws barely moved. The change is underneath, where the linebackers play in the new 3-4. Next test: Brock Bowers on Sunday. Half his targets come within 10 yards.

@Pro__Ant Love seeing these! Thank you for all that you do! Posting for my fellow visual learners.

@DelReid Hopefully not for another decade

Stafford completed 74% of his passes Monday. That reads like a quarterback carving up a defense. The data says otherwise: the ball came out fast, the throws were routine, and most of LA's receiving yards came after the catch, usually before a defender arrived. Three questions explain it. 1. How fast did the ball come out? 2.1 seconds in the pocket on average. Buffalo recorded 1 sack and 4 QB hits on 55 dropbacks. When the ball is out that quickly, the pass rush rarely factors into the play. 2. How hard were the throws? Stafford's CPOE (completion % over expected) was +1.3%. CPOE compares a QB's completions to what an average QB completes on the same throws. A number near zero means routine throws, not tight windows. His average throw traveled 6.4 yards past the line. 3. Where did the yards come from? Of 383 receiving yards, 216 came after the catch (56%). Of those 216: • 133 came before the first defender made contact • 83 came after contact Open space accounted for most of it; yards after contact added the rest. Backs and tight ends gained 66% of their yards after the catch, Nacua 59%, Adams 18%. LA's longest play was 34 yards. The yards came underneath, not over the top. The Rams' passing game was still efficient: +0.38 EPA per pass play (no garbage-time filter needed; one-score game throughout). The efficiency came from space after the catch, not from difficult throws. Why it mattered: with the run game at 3.3 yards per carry, the short passing game carried the offense. LA converted 9 of 16 on 3rd and 4th down, scored TDs on all 5 red zone trips, and held the ball for 37:57. One game, against a receiver who specializes in finding gaps in zone coverage. But it fits the season: Buffalo ranks 30th in defensive EPA per play through five weeks.

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The Puka side is interesting. He wasn't really more open necessarily(2.9 yds), the Rams just kept going to him. When Stafford looked for him downfield in the second quarter, Buffalo mostly took it away, and he was 1 of 5 on those throws. So in the third, LA got him the ball at or behind the line and let him work after the catch, and he went 6 for 6. That's probably why it felt like he was everywhere. He was. But per target he was less productive than the rest of the Rams' passing game (+0.19 EPA vs. +0.53). Seems like Buffalo was willing to give up the catches as long as he stayed in front of them.

@YardsPerPass Thought that was a key part of the win yesterday. The YAC, specifically over par, were key to that win against a pretty amazing pass defense through 4 weeks.

Fourth & Why @FourthAndWhy

3 days ago

Let's talk about how Buffalo beat the best pass defense in football without really throwing downfield. Start with what the Bills were up against. Through four weeks, the Rams allowed 4.84 yards per pass attempt, the fewest in the NFL. That's a defense built to keep everything in

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Let's talk about how Buffalo beat the best pass defense in football without really throwing downfield. Start with what the Bills were up against. Through four weeks, the Rams allowed 4.84 yards per pass attempt, the fewest in the NFL. That's a defense built to keep everything in front of it. It gives you the short throw, then rallies and tackles before you get anywhere. Teams that tried to beat it deep mostly didn't. So Buffalo didn't try. If you go back and watch Allen's completions, look at where the ball is caught. On average it was about 1 yard past the line of scrimmage. Six of his 12 completions were caught behind the line. And half of them went to running backs. Ty Johnson, Ray Davis and James Cook combined for 6 catches and 110 yards. That's the setup. Here's the part that decided the game, and it's a stat worth learning: yards after catch over expected. Think of it like par in golf. Every time a pass is caught, a model looks at where the ball was caught, field position, down and distance, and sets a par: how many yards a typical ball carrier gets after the catch on a play like that. Beat par and the runner did something extra. Fall short and the defense won the rep. Add up par for every Buffalo catch Monday and you get about 84 yards after the catch. Buffalo gained 196. That's 112 yards over par. Since the start of 2024, across 1,298 team games, only two teams have beaten par by more in a single game. And it wasn't spread evenly. Four plays did almost all of it: 1. Shakir's 57-yarder: caught 5 yards past the line, par was about 5 more. He ran for 52. 2. Ty Johnson's 40-yarder: caught 4 yards behind the line, par was about 10. He ran for 44. 3. Ray Davis's 31-yarder: caught 7 yards behind the line, par was about 12. He ran for 38. 4. Ty Johnson's 26-yarder: caught 5 yards past the line, par was about 4. He ran for 21. Four short throws. Par says about 30 yards after the catch combined. Buffalo got 155. Now connect it to the scoreboard. Three of those four plays set up touchdowns: Cook's 17-yard run, Coleman's 7-yard catch and Allen's 1-yard run. Those drives were worth 21 points, in a game Buffalo won by 3. The fourth was Shakir's catch in overtime, which put Buffalo in field goal range one play before the fumble. Here's the important caution, and the reason to understand this stat rather than just quote it. Yards after catch over par swings a lot from week to week. In Buffalo's first four games it added up to roughly zero. The Rams had been allowing 37 fewer yards after the catch than par over those same four weeks, so tackling had been one of their strengths. Monday was a big outlier, and you shouldn't expect +112 again. What can carry over is the plan. Against a defense designed to take away deep throws, Buffalo got the ball to its backs early, often behind the line, and asked them to make something happen. When you watch Sunday at Las Vegas, keep an eye on how often the running backs are catching passes. That tells you whether Monday was a one-week plan or part of how this offense intends to play. Quick glossary: Yards after catch: what the ball carrier gains after catching the pass. Expected yards after catch ("par"): what a typical ball carrier gains on a catch like that one. Over expected: actual minus par. Positive means the play went further than normal. Behind the line: caught before reaching the line of scrimmage, which shows up as negative air yards.