Albert, give me a game that you're looking for on Sunday.
So I'm gonna take the last one on Sunday.
You took the first one.
I'm gonna take the last one.
Dallas at Green Bay.
Um, you know, again, I think, you know, for both teams, they're not like at a critical point, um, where like their seasons on the online or anything, but I mean, the Eagles are, are the, the, the Cowboys are 2 and 3 tied with the Eagles, and the Packers are 3 and 2 in a division that looks like it might have 44 teams finish the season above 500, you know, so, the Packers are in a situation where every game is critical.
The Cowboys are actually closer to first place at 2 and 3 than the Packers are at 3 and 2.
And I just, I think like both these teams have relatively high ceilings, you know, and so, like, is what we saw from Jordan Love, which was fantastic on Sunday, is that real?
Um, how do the Cowboys hold up against that Packers offense defensively?
Um, do we see more of Joey Porter now, right?
Like, and are we now at a point where defensively, it's gonna be like kind of the group that we see them going forward with?
Like, can you get more out of that group?
Um, You know, the Micah Parsons storylines obviously the Micah Parsons storyline.
Um, so, like, I think there's just like a lot of interesting, a lot of interesting, um, pieces to this one, and I do think it's like a, I think it's a pretty important game for both teams.
I mean, it could wind up, it's , it's also one of those like where if these teams wind up as wild cards, it could wind up determining where a playoff game is played.
This is a Mike Petton revenge game, uh, him going against his former, uh, employer, the Green Bay Packers.
He was a defensive coordinator for Matt LaFleur.
And, uh, Mike Petton gave Christian Parker his start in the NFL, so there's a relationship there.
But that said, it's not as simple as, hey, there's a new guy that's gonna come in and help you call the plays, you know, uh, there's, there's a, Socio-emotional dynamic to all this, Albert.
I mean, it's, it's hard for a young guy getting his first shot at this to come in and now have somebody kind of sitting next to him and, and looking over his shoulder.
And we've seen additions like this fail spectacularly.
Um, I'm thinking about like the game management coach that was added to Nathaniel Hackett's staff in Denver.
Uh, I remember when Rex Ryan went out, actually, uh, speaking of the Rex Ryan Brian Schottenheimer connection, when Brian Schottenheimer was struggling in 2011, brought in Tom Moore, uh, to, to, and Brian Schottenheimer had to fax the game plans over to, uh, Tommy, who back then felt like he was 90 years old and is still in the NFL, uh, or still in football, working on stuff, but, um, Yeah, I, I, I, I, the dynamics of this can be complicated, but people roll their eyes at Petton.
I think Petton's a brilliant defensive coach, has been in the league for a long time, and I think this could be a net ad if you play it right.
So, like, I think, like, we're all wondering what would be the obvious here, which is you're putting an experienced play caller on the staff.
Are you doing it?
Like in case of emergency break glass, right, did you read it that way at all?
Well, so it's hard not to, right?
It's hard not to, except for the fact that Petton and Parker have a defined relationship.
Now, what is interesting about it is you could argue that they have two very different schematics, and that's what I was gonna get to is like that's a guy, right?
This feels to me, this feels to me.
Like If that was the plan, that's a flawed plan, and I'd take you back to the Eagles in 2023 to prove it, right, where you had Sean Dea.
If you remember, the Eagles hired Sean Desa because they wanted Vic Fangio's scheme.
They tried to poach, uh, Vic from Miami, if I remember it was right, if, if I'm, if I remember that correctly.
They tried to poach Vic from Miami.
They couldn't get him.
And, um , and then, and then they brought in Sean Sider to put that scheme in, um, for one reason or another, it didn't work.
They had Matt Patricia on the staff.
Matt Patricia, also a really, really high-end defensive mind, but now he's running somebody else's scheme.
And it became impossible because, like, could he draw it up and could he explain what they were doing?
Yeah, of course he could.
But like when things went wrong, Could he fix it?
As things were happening in games, could he troubleshoot it?
And that was the problem.
It's like when you don't have, when you aren't at like a part of like building a scheme at the grassroots, and you haven't taught it since you were younger, and you haven't called it, you haven't been part of calling it before, then, Like now you're being asked to do it.
It's like a totally different deal.
So, you know, Patricia was asked to call Fangio's scheme because that's what the players have been taught since the spring, you know, like he wasn't gonna put in the Patriots scheme all of a sudden, the same way Mike Petton, if they were gonna go to, if they were gonna go to Petton, wouldn't be able to just put the Ravens scheme in, you know, he wouldn't be able to do that, so.
Like that's why like I think I like this for what it is.
Like I like this for giving Christian Parker a helping hand with some stuff.
I think where you get into trouble is if you start viewing this as like we're gonna fire him in 3 games and then Mike Petton's gonna take over play calling because I'm not sure that that would really work.
I'm gonna give you an image of something that you're gonna do that like bringing Ed Don Donatell or something, you know what I mean.
I want to give you an image of something that Matt Nagy put in my head once, because I, I, I, I would like people to understand that there is no real Vic Fangio defense.
There's Vic Fangio, right?
And there's working for Vic Fangio, and there's an idea of what he runs, but Matt Nagy told this story once, and he said, I remember walking by his office, and he's just sitting there by himself with a stack of Papers on one side, hard copies of all the looks that he's gonna see from the opposing offense, uh, on Sunday, and by pencil, by hand, is just doing tendency breakers over and over and over again.
What can I do here?
What can I do here?
What can I do here?
What can I do here?
I love Christian Parker.
I think he's going to be a bright young coach in this league, and I think he's gonna coach in this league for a long time.
He, it's impossible for him to have that experience because Vic Fangio's been doing that.
Since Vic Fangio coached against my father in high school, like in 1970, yeah, so like, you know, I knew you guys had the Scranton connection.
I didn't know that.
He was the defensive coordinator of the Dunmore Bucks in 1978, doing tendency breakers for who was then, uh, one of the most legendary.
Um, uh, uh, Hens, coach Hens, one of the most legendary coaches in area history, and that Vic, the guy who Vic Fangio coached for coached for 100 years, right?
It's just impossible to expect Christian Parker to have that base of knowledge yet.
That's it, you know what I mean?
And so it's hard to run the Vic Fangio scheme without the, that part of it, without the, without the robot brain in there, right?
And like that's like comes back to.
Like why the Shanahan McVeigh tree, like why they'll all tell you, you can draw our offense up, but you don't know it unless you learned it from the grassroots, like, because you don't have the detail, you don't know how we teach it, you don't know, like you don't know it, you know what I mean?
Like you don't know why we're doing all of these things.
You don't know why this guard's hand is placed here.
You don't know why, like you don't know, and, and, and essentially like so much of what they do, I mean, You bring it back to like my background, like the wing tee is like, when I was a kid, like it was like, like, oh yeah, we ran like 50 plays, but it was really just 8 concepts with like 6 plays off of each of them, you know, and like the Shanahan offense, for example, there's these bigger, like over, overreaching concepts, and they're running all these concepts off the same, they're running these concepts, but they're running all these plays off those concepts.
If you don't know how to teach those concepts cause so much of it's based on detail, then you got nothing.
Because then you don't know how to correct it when something goes wrong, right?
You have to be able to know, and, and then that's where I think it comes into, where it comes in, right?
Like it's like, it's like, can I call, can I, can I, can I draw it up?
Can I call it?
Yeah.
Can I correct it?
That's a little harder, you know, and that's what you're talking about with Fangio where it's like he can correct it because he's seen it up against almost anything you could possibly do to it, you know.
And so yeah anyway that's a tangent that we just got no it's, but I think that's, it's fun and it's like here's the diff like this is what we're gonna lose.
I mean, so much of what I say, this is like how I can feel my age, so much of what I say now like comes back to it's not Madden, you know what I mean like it's not Madden and it's not like, like.
When you play Madden as a kid, you can run every play in the playbook, right?
You can run every play in the play.
Like you don't have to get good at it.
You can just like, I can punch this in.
I can run whatever I want, right?
Like these are actual human beings have to having to execute this and it's way more detailed than you realize and getting human beings to be really good at these things is really, really hard.
And it takes a lot of detail and everything else.
It is not Madden, you know, it's the same as like the whole argument like, we'll play them all in the preseason.
Well, those are human beings out there and they do have an odometer on their bodies and like throwing them out there for 3 preseason games might not be the best idea.
Like when they still need to be standing in December and January.
I will say this about Madden, one of my good friends, uh, to this day, uh, his dad was the high school football coach, and so, growing up, you know, he had the time on task in terms of playing Madden, he had the hours, but his dad would sit down there and just because he had like a brilliant schematic mind, would know exactly When to call like a cover 3 corner blitz and just like he was one step ahead of his son at every moment in time because he could see the game that way and it didn't matter that, oh, I'm good with the joysticks, it was like, no, you can do nothing against this coverage right now.
I'm absolutely burying your ass.
So, uh, I, I always, uh, I always liked, uh, thinking about that really quickly on the Packers, the I'm gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna just take a pause.
Because last week was so exciting.
But here's some, it was like, oh my God, there it is, right?
Right.
Oh my God, there it is.
But here's a couple of things that happened last week that I don't think are gonna happen this week.
Tyson Bagen's not gonna turn the ball over twice, OK?
Dak Prescott is not Tyson Bagent.
Fair enough.
And, and I, and I wonder, Dallas's defense is equally, is, is worse than Chicago, but how do you look at that tape?
And allow what happened a second week in a row.
Um, if you're Mike Petton, if you're Christian Parker, you talk about Madden .
And it, it was obviously more complex than this, and they were great in play action too, but the Packers were just bombing it down the field.
Like they were just bombing it down the field.
And uh I, I would guess that Dallas is gonna be more uh uh inclined to be like, hey, why don't you, let's see if you can run the ball against us, you know, like, I'm not letting that happen again.
I'm not letting Christian Watson just absolutely destroy us, so we'll see.
Um.
We'll see what happens.
I think this is, uh, this is definitely, uh, uh, an interesting one to keep an eye on.