Biomechanical Review: Joe Flacco

In the biomechanical review of Gary Kubiak, we discussed how Kubiak designed a technical approach to playing QB that maximized vertical accuracy at some cost to horizontal throwing range (if you haven’t already, you can read it here).  This approach complements the systemic design of the Shanahan/ Kubiak offense, which schematically stretches defenses wide with the run game, while attacking defenses vertically with the pass (often from a half-field read off of a bootleg).  

From a biomechanical perspective, Joe Flacco is a perfect fit for this offense.  His strengths and weaknesses as a passer perfectly mirror the strengths and weaknesses inherent to the offense designed by Gary Kubiak and Mike Shanahan.  Where Kubiak designed techniques to borrow from posterior lateral areas to enhance vertical throwing accuracy, Flacco is naturally extremely efficient in his posterior lateral areas.  Where Shanahan designed an offense with simplified reads and limited horizontal throwing range, Flacco excels when he can avoid full-field reads and quick changes of horizontal direction (due to compromised anterior medial efficiency).  

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Biomechanical Review: Gary Kubiak

Gary Kubiak is a coach who blends a technical approach to the QB position with a complementary offensive scheme.  When Mike Shanahan and Alex Gibbs brought the zone-blocking scheme to the NFL, Kubiak (as Shanahan’s QB coach) added a specific way of playing QB to this scheme, designed to maximize vertical throwing accuracy.  His technical approach enabled many QBs in the Shanahan/ Kubiak ZBS to play more effectively than might be presumed by their general talent level.

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Large-Scale Trends and the 2018 NFL Draft (part 1)

Ever since I started writing for this site a couple years ago, I’ve been dancing around mentioning a highly-apparent but difficult-to-describe phenomenon.  Simply put, NFL players have been changing dramatically in recent years. What was once a subtle distinction between players has grown to become a hard schism. And in the process, long-time NFL trends/ wisdoms have been overturned.

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Biomechanical Season Preview 2017 (part 1)

Hi guys, I’m still totally swamped (shocker, I know), so I’m breaking my predictions into three parts.  This first section is for the studied RBs in the season opener (plus a bonus entry).  The next part will contain the other studied players from around the league.  And the third part will contain my Broncos analyses, with special emphasis on the QBs. Parts two and three will go up before Sunday’s games start, so that all predictions are posted before the relevant players have begun their seasons.

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2016 Biomechanical Preview

2016 Biomechanical NFL Preview

Hello friends.  It’s become clear that I was a bit hasty in deciding to post biomechanical analyses.  This site is filled with intelligent discerning readers, but without being able to visually represent this stuff, I can’t explain it to anyone’s satisfaction.  I can’t even really post predictions, since each one is a set of complicated if/thens that are dependent on factors I can’t clarify (see my Siemian write-up for an example).

So I’ve boiled down my predictions to a few that can be communicated without biomechanical jargon:

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