Let’s eat dessert first, because it’s going to be an ashen meal after this.
The offense clawed back into this game with about 20 successful passes. I saw a number of patterns, including burning DBs down the field and earning pass interference flags, Herbert scrambling into open grass, creating confusion in the secondary by sending multiple tight ends deep into the pattern, and taking advantage of soft coverage on the speedier #13 WR Mitchell and #30 WR Redd. But what really made it a game were several pretty heroic receptions in tight coverage:
I won’t annotate these because there’s nothing schematic about them, they’re just gutsy calls, throws, and catches with zero margin for error.