Film breakdown: 4th and 1 “Decoy” Slat/Flat failure by Browns vs Giants

Trying to understand what happened on this play

The Cleveland Browns all of a sudden had some drama Wednesday as QB Deshaun Watson said that TE Jordan Akins was the “decoy” on the huge 4th and 1 stop against the New York Giants.

In an attempt to understand the play, I created a YouTube video. Unfortunately, my system was a little slow in the end so the last 30 seconds are choppy (and I cut off the other view of the play I talked about in the video).

Watson noted that “other people are not in the film room,” which is accurate. As I attempted to break down the play, I do not know how HC Kevin Stefanski coached the play but traditional slant/flat concepts are not overly complicated:

For his part, Akins noted that it was an “RPO,” run-pass option, despite what seems like pass block sets by the tackles:

In the end, the blame goes to one of two places:

• Either Stefanski told Watson that Akins was not an option in the play so the QB looked to Jeudy and then looked to run

Or

• Watson did not read the defense correctly on slant/flat and used the idea of “decoy” to deflect blame.

In the end, the Browns lost the game and that is all that matters but the play itself was something I thought would be interesting to break down.

Here is the play without any of the audio from me, you can decide for yourself what you see:

What do you think happened here? Share your thoughts in the comment section