At least make sure it's the wide nine.
Fred Jackson's comments after the game, as reported by Rich Hofmann and then cited as compelling evidence by everyone and his or her mother:
"[The shovel pass] was something we wanted to take advantage of with them bringing that wide nine," said Bills running back Fred Jackson, who ran 26 times for 111 yards and a touchdown and caught six passes for 85 yards in Buffalo's 31-24 win over the Eagles.
"Again, hats off to our coaches' scouting. They see things like that. We haven't run the shovel pass all year and we put it in there so we really worked on it. It was something that we thought we could take advantage of."
And the screens?
"Again, wide nines," Jackson said. "They like to get upfield and we knew as long as we could get that nine [the widest defensive end] upfield, we could get under him and be able to spring off it."
So let's start with the shovel passes. The Bills ran three of them. They gained 7, -2 and 9 yards (plus a 15-yard facemask on Nnamdi, but if you want to blame that on Washburn...). That's an average of 4.7 yards per play.
And the running back screens? Those went for 49, 5, 3 and -3 yards. That's one big play and three that went nowhere.
But wait, you say, what about the one big play? Doesn't that prove the wide nine is terrible, because like Jackson said, all you need to do is run it to the side with the DE standing waaaaaay out there and it will work every time?
Uh-huh. Only problem is, here's the pre-snap alignment on that one (click for larger):
Well, that's strange. Because that screen pass went to the right and yet the wide nine DE in this case seems to be on the other side. It's almost like Jason Babin was lined up in a perfectly conventional position over there. Do we have another angle on that?
What if you got totally crazy, dumped the screen captures into Photoshop and then adjusted these two pictures so that you were getting a straight-on perspective:
Yep. It's like Hofmann (almost) said:
Out of the mouths of opponents full of themselves, and full of victory, oft times come gems complete and utter BS.
