Red Zone Woes

[PlayerFormerlyKnownAsMousecop]

(09-30-2016, 04:36 PM)wolfkaosaun Wrote: Inside the red zone, it's no surprise that the Bengals have struggled inside the red zone. You watch the games, you can tell. But just how bad are they?

Well, currently they rank 29th in the league with scoring a TD in the red zone with a percentage of 30.77%. To make it worse, on the road they have a percentage of 16.67%. Home isn't much better with a ranking of 42.86%. Which would rank them 21st in the NFL.

In comparison, the Bengals were tied for 5th in the league with 65%.

So let's take a deeper look at the team.

Inside the 10 yard line, the Bengals have only run with Hill. They've ran 5 times with him for a total of 3 yards inside the 10.

Inside the 10 yard line, the Bengals have passed the ball 6 times for one completion. Uzomah has been targeted twice. Boyd targeted once. LaFell targeted once. And Green targeted once. Along with one throw away. Green is the only one to catch a pass inside the 10, and he did that last night.

But let's look at the packages that the Bengals have done with running situations. On EVERY single run inside the 10 yard line, they've used multiple offensive lineman. And on 2 of Dalton's 6 throws have come out of the same formation.

So what does this mean? It's predictable. Multiple offensive lineman? Stack the box and have someone on Uzomah. Because that's the first read and a lot of Zampese's passing offense is first read.

The other 4 throws? One was a TD to Green in a normal formation. LaFell was barely out of bounds on one throw. One was a throw away. And the other was that drop/deflection to Boyd last night.

Zampese's red zone offense is one of the worst in the league. And it has no reason to be. You have some very good players, but inside the red zone gets very predictable. They've had 6 or more offensive lineman on 7 of their 11 tries inside the 10 yard line. Sure, they've scored 3 total TDs inside the 10 (2 for Hill, 1 for Green). But that's it. This team has too much talent to be that predictable inside the red zone.

Okay, it's not like the defense can just key in on Hill and triple team AJ. Oh, wait...

The reason we haven't been throwing those fades to AJ is because they haven't been there. We don't have the weapons at the moment to execute in the red zone as an elite offense.

However, once Eifert is back, even if he's only used as a decoy at first, the whole dynamic of our redzone offense changes. Teams cannot account for Green, Hill, and Eifert in the redzone. That's why our redzone offense was so successful last year.

I'd even go as far to say that the lack of running game stems from our lack of weapons on the offensive side. Teams know we're basically going to do two things to get big plays: Hand the ball to Hill, or throw the ball to Green.

One thing I am worried about, though, is the O-line play. They need to be able to give Dalton more space in the pocket. He looks like he's being swallowed up every play back there.

The fact Dalton has performed as well as he has with the O-line being as bad as it has been is nothing short of MVP play. Palmer never would have been able to do that.