Sully, Beaux, and the return of Justis (@JuMosq) run through every game (besides Monday Night Football of course), talk how big week 7 was for the playoff picture, and debate who the best team in the AFC West is.

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Coley and Tyler join up with Sully and Beaux on NBA New Year’s to preview the league, give takes on over-unders, MVP odds and more.

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Coley and Tyler detail Rasheed Wallace’s efforts to help the people of Flint, celebrate how their demand for a J.R. Smith signing led to a new contract with Cleveland, and preview the Eastern Conference.

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Coley and Tyler introduce the podcast, make the case to sign J.R. Smith, declare their allegiance to the Minnesota Timberwolves, and look forward to an NBA season without Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett.

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On this week’s episode of Keep Choppin’ Wood from SB Nation’s Big Cat Country, we talk about just the Jacksonville Jaguars vs. Indianapolis Colts game in London at Wembley Stadium, Blake Bortles’ continued regression, Yannick Ngakoue’s surprising start, Jalen Ramsey vs. Rashean Mathis, Gus Bradley, and more from around the NFL.

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Sully is joined by college football expert and all around awesome guy Michael Felder (@IntheBleachers) from Bleacher Report. Includes Heisman race talk, Lamar Jackson the god, playoff predictions and who’s seat is hottest.

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Sure, an offense with more predication on the quick pass game would help in theory, but you already described the rub – the Panthers’ personnel isn’t really suited for it at all. Mastering the quick pass game requires an incredible time and resource commitment, and they’re probably better off mastering the things that their personnel is built to do. Fleshing out their runningback and tight end screen game would probably be a better way to complement their deep drop pass game.

Teams like Denver and Minnesota are obviously bad matchups for their offense. But remember that the Denver defense also beat Tom Brady twice last year, and the New England pass game is as predicated on the quick game as you can possibly be.

Brent: Does a healthy Marqise Lee make the offense worse? It almost seems like Jags are obligated to feed him.

It’s not that they’re obligated to feed him, it’s that defenses are finding ways to funnel the ball to the Jaguars’ worst skill position players. It’s not unlike the problem Green Bay has with the ball being funneled to Davante Adams.

The crutch is that good quarterbacks make bad players look better than they are. The last throw I wrote about in this week’s Bortles piece is a perfect example of a quarterback playing poorly and making his wide receiver look worse. Lee’s bad enough as is, he doesn’t need help looking worse.

Azeem: Who will be good at football first – the Jags or Tarheels?

Both should just focus on themselves.

Lucas: Why do bad teams stay bad, and vice versa? With coaching/GM/player turnover, I feel like there should be more parity, but there definitely isn’t. Related: will the Bears ever be good again? Pls say yes.

A lot of it is because there’s way more dissension and political backstabbing inside most NFL buildings than you’d ever be led to believe. Remember that an NFL organization is bound by the limits of humans being forced to interact with each other. You’ve got different personality types, ways of learning and processing information, and a LOT of ego. And, ultimately, everybody is really looking out for their own best interests. I say often that what’s good for a GM or coach’s job security isn’t necessarily what’s in the best interest of the team. Good teams stay good because they don’t need to convince themselves that the shit they’ve bought is, in fact, shit. Self-scouting is the hardest type of scouting.

Also, there’s only like 3-5 teams at a time with a quarterback capable of covering up for a poor roster’s flaws. GMs know that if they find #theguy, they’re basically set forever. Look how long Ryan Grigson has been GM of the Colts, and the only thing he’s not fucked up in Indianapolis was picking Andrew Luck first overall. Strong resume there. The tantalization of finding the guy and then coasting on that leads to a lot of repetitive patterns for franchises.

Thomas: Is Dave Caldwell too tied to Gus Bradley for him to stay even if Gus is fired?

Hank and I talked about this on the latest Keep Choppin’ Wood episode, and it’s a good follow-up to the previous question. You can already see how Caldwell can set this up pretty easily to absolve himself of blame (remember that GMs are snakes, and everybody’s #1 concern in the NFL is to keep their job as long as possible). He can say that Gus has made bad coaching hires, mismanaged their talent, etc.

The black mark against Caldwell right now is he’s put a ton of draft capital into the offense, and few of those investments have paid off. Most GMs are judged by their quarterback selection, and very few get to make a second one. If Bortles’ poor play continues, I think you have to seriously consider bringing in someone new who has an unbiased opinion of Bortles and the other players on the roster. If Blake isn’t the guy, the worst possible outcome is retaining Caldwell, forcing his (bad) quarterback on coaching candidates and narrowing the pool, and ultimately wasting another two years. Caldwell isn’t as bad as his predecessor by any means, but you can see history repeating itself identically as to when the Jaguars hired Mularkey because they couldn’t get anyone reputable willing to coach Gabbert.

Ben: You have gone on and on about Blake Bortles’ regression and his current badness. But there of course is the question of why/how he’s gotten here?

I’ve said before that he’s not an overly-intellectual player, and that he plays off instinct. He’s not trusting what he sees, he’s not seeing the field clearly, and his accuracy has gone to shit.

Also, this is nothing but conjecture, but I really think Blake and this entire team got gassed up by their own hype (how a 5-11 team has hype, I’ll never know) and believed that they had arrived before they were even good. Example:

Well. Maybe that was a bad idea. https://t.co/1HP99v78YA

— Adam Bealyer (@Bealzies) September 27, 2016

You only won 5 games, the offense finally showed promise, so you immediately planned to work LESS.

— Adam Bealyer (@Bealzies) September 27, 2016

Weird.

JT: Can you explain why Zero WR is an especially bad fantasy draft strategy?

Honestly, the best fantasy team I ever drafted was a Zero WR team (RIP Josh Gordon), and I think in standard scoring leagues it might even be the optimal strategy. If you play PPR, it’s probably not the best strategy, but (like any draft strategy) it is viable if you pick the right players. However, you shouldn’t be playing PPR willingly (DFS excluded) because PPR is for fucking cowards and PPR with Flex spots is downright un-American.

I first read about RBx5 or Zero WR from this piece on Rotoviz. Gordon in the 8th round was really the key that made this entire strategy work. 2013 was honestly an amazing year for that strategy. I’ve had up-and-down success with it since then, but mostly I really like how disorienting it is during the draft for your leaguemates. People see the RB supply drying up even faster than usual, reaches happen, and shit gets weird. Having a league that is very trade-friendly helps too. If you have a bunch of assholes who sit on the same roster all year, you could end up screwing yourself.

Ask yourself this: if you had started a fantasy draft off with Ezekiel Elliot, CJ Anderson, Melvin Gordon, and LeGarrette Blount in the first four rounds, you’d probably be feeling pretty good about your team right now – wide receiver be damned. What if you had gone WR heavy and started with a Julio Jones/Sammy Watkins duo or Dez Bryant/Keenan Allen? It really always comes back to picking the right dudes, having good luck with injuries, and fixing your weak spots through the waiver wire or trades.

Colin: What do you think about poops after you shower? 

It’s almost as bad as PPR leagues with multiple flex spots.

The fact that we can even have a comparison between the two is highly disappointing. However, it’s not completely unfounded. Here’s a video from 2012 with current Jaguars Offensive Coordinator Greg Olsen. Olsen served as the Quarterback coach under the previous regime (Mike Mularkey’s sole season in Jacksonville). After the entire staff was fired, he went to Oakland and ran the offense in Derek Carr’s rookie year, then returned to Jacksonville as Jedd Fisch’s replacement on Gus Bradley’s staff. That’s a really convoluted way of saying that he’s worked directly with both Blaine Gabbert and Blake Bortles.

The video begins with Olson explaining their Out-Skinny Post concept, a Hi-Low against the Hook-to-Curl defender. The idea is to get his shoulders to turn and open with the Out, opening a window to hit the Skinny Post behind him.

This is a very basic concept that every single NFL team runs in every single NFL game. It’s versatile and can be successful against a number of different coverages, provided the Post runner keeps inside leverage on the corner and the quarterback places the ball into the window with the proper trajectory. If you watched the video, you saw Blaine complete this route combo a number of different times.

Now, here’s Blake running the exact same concept against the Ravens last week.

What should be an easy pitch-and-catch where Hurns can protect himself turns into a hospital ball. Hurns has to stop, jump in the air and contort his body which allows the safety to close and hit him in mid-air.

Not ideal.

On the very next play, they run the same concept. Baltimore runs Cover-2 instead of Cover-3, but it’s the same read – just with slightly different timing and trajectory on the ball.

As you can see, the window opens and closes a lot quicker here. The ball comes out late and behind the receiver, leading to another potential hospital ball (I’m fine with the low trajectory howver, because it gives the wide receiver an opportunity to protect himself in a really congested area.)

These are two opportunities where the offense gets a good look and a man open (albeit, in tight windows) where the quarterback busts the play. They proceeded to punt. Again, this is a really basic concept that every NFL quarterback has to be able to make. Blaine Gabbert routinely made this play.

Inaccuracy doesn’t show up on the stat sheet as much more than an incomplete pass, but what’s missing from the box score is yardage that a team leaves on the field. Here’s another example:

It’s 3rd and 8 in the first quarter with the game at 0-0, and the Jaguars call up for a Post-Deep Cross Hi-Lo of the deep safety. This Hi-Lo is another that will work against multiple coverages, man or zone, with the objectives being having the Post runner maintain inside leverage on the corner and to get the safety on that side (or in the middle of the field if it is a single-high coverage, as what ends up being the case here) to open his hips with the Deep Cross. As soon as the safeties hips open, the ball needs to be on it’s way over the top.

The ball comes out on time, but instead of leading the wide receiver into the middle of the field for an easy touchdown, he leads him back outside towards the cornerback. This is what I brought up in the podcast about the quarterback making a bad wide receiver look bad. Marqise Lee struggles adjusting to the ball in the air and making contested caches, and what should have been an easy touchdown leads to a drop and a punt because Bortles made him do exactly that.

These plays show how a quarterback struggling with timing and accuracy can completely break an offense. The scary thing is that aren’t Bortles’ worst plays – I wouldn’t even put these in his bottom five for the Ravens game. All of his turnovers this season have been downright reprehensible, and the sacks he took in crunch time against Baltimore were the worst outcomes you could possibly have on those plays. He’s struggling seeing the field clearly, cannot throw accurately, and is showing poor situational awareness. He is arguably playing like the worst quarterback in the NFL, and the rest of the season should essentially be viewed as an extended tryout.

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On this week’s episode of Keep Choppin’ Wood, we talk about just how bad the game against the Baltimore Ravens was, just how bad Blake Bortles was, why Gus Bradley needs to get fired immediately after London, and more about the future of this NFL franchise.

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Sully is joined by Evan Silva (@evansilva) from Rotoworld.com and pretty much every other fantasy publication known to man. Sleeper pickups, best strategies week-to-week and who has some favorable schedules coming up.

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