Sacks and Shutouts

Five games were played last night:

Cincinnati Bengals (3) at Detroit Lions (34)

Miami Dolphins (28) at Atlanta Falcons (23)

Pittsburgh Steelers (7) at Washington Redskins (16)

San Francisco 49ers (3) at New Orleans Saints (24)

Tampa Bay Buccaneers (25) at Kansas City Chiefs (0)

The television coverage is limited right now, and the only two games I could watch were the Miami Dolphins at Atlanta Falcons, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Kansas City Chiefs. SportsCenter on ESPN is a great resource to find out what I missed in the other games, and get highlights of the games I did see.

During the 49ers/Saints game, the Saints had 6 sacks in the first half. A sack means the quarterback is tackled before he hands the ball off to a runner or throws (passes) it to a receiver; only quarterbacks are sacked. The goal is to have zero sacks in a game. To have 6 in the first half means the offensive line did not do their job protecting the quarterback.

Sacks are bad for three reasons:

1. The quarterback is more likely to be injured while being sacked;
2. The sack effectively wastes the down, because there is no forward progress of the ball;
3. Because the quarterback is behind the line of scrimmage, and drops back farther if he is going to pass, getting sacked almost always results in loss of yardage.

Commentators talk about the “pocket collapsing” around the quarterback; this is the line of offensive players whose job is to prevent the defensive players from getting to the quarterback and sacking him, or interfering with the forward progress of the ball in any way. They form almost a horseshoe around the quarterback, and this is called the “pocket.” It is hard to win a game when a team is not moving the ball forward on every down, and in this case New Orleans beat San Francisco handily.

A shutout occurs when one team prevents the other team from scoring any points, effectively shutting them out from scoring. In the Tampa Bay game at Kansas City, Tampa Bay shutout Kansas City. In this case, Tampa’s offense was better than the Kansas City defense, and the Tampa defense was better than the Kansas City offense.

Five games are being played tonight:

Green Bay Packers at Cleveland Browns

Buffalo Bills at Chicago Bears

Indianapolis Colts at St. Louis Rams

New York Giants at Carolina Panthers

Minnesota Vikings at Tennessee Titans

For more information about football, Football Basics - How the American Football Game is Played is available as a Kindle ebook at Amazon. Click the book title to purchase, or visit my website www.FootballBasics.net to read an excerpt of the book.