Anatomy of a Play - McFadden's 64 Yard Run

With the help of NFL.com's All 22 Tape, we now have the ability to view and break down a specific play frame by frame to analyze what went right, or in this case wrong.    Let's take a look at Darren McFadden's 64 yard TD run against the Steelers from last Sunday.

At the snap, the Steelers are lined up in their base 3-4 with Casey Hampton playing 0 Technique over the Center.  The Raiders started in a 4 Wide look before motioning McFadden back into the backfield as a runner.

At the snap Casey Hampton is solo blocked and easily moved down the line.   The LG and LT pick Keisel, and Hood is taken on by the RT.  Timmons poorly diagnoses the play and attacks the O-line off LG for some unknown reason even though the zone blocking scheme is all moving the opposite direction.  Foote attacks the outside making me believe Timmons blew his responsibility in the middle of the defense.

As you can see here, McFadden runs right past Casey Hampton with big Hamp as much as lifting an arm to try and slow his progress.  Timmons is in no man's land trying to get back to the area he just vacated.  Foote is apparently defending the outside run to the sidelines which leaves the middle of the field open save Ryan Mundy.  Mundy is already frozen in space even though the runner has only gained 2 yards at this point, Mundy stops trying to close down the running lane and waits. 

Instead of closing distance, Mundy remains frozen in time giving a gifted runner like McFadden all day to pick which way he'll juke Mundy.

And lastly, Keenan Lewis impressively gives pursuit to close the distance, but doesn;t know what to do once he reaches McFadden.  He was close enough to make a dive tackle at the 10 yard line, but instead waited until he was ta the 7 to push McFadden towards the end zone rather than dive at his feet to make a tackle.