Great post and great study. Although I was lost a bit as to the summary that at the end of day the fault was schottenheimer's. Seems it was both being slow to adapt and simply not reading the defense quickly enough and hitting the open player. Seems to me if we had done that, we might be playing this weekend.
There's also a great piece in the Athletic on the Hawks offense this season by Schiel Kapadia. He points out via factual analysis and stats that contrary to popular belief the hawks didn't dial back the pass as much as is believed - that we still threw it around oretty frequently, particularly on early downs. Just nor as effectively. One notable decline was on deep attempts and completions. One other interesting tidbit was Wilson's rating while NOT under pressure/ aka a clean pocket with time to throw was worse in the second half of the season than the first. Also and this is even more glaring after watching this video - that Russell looked entirely confused for the entire game against the Rams.
So in a nutshell, we didn't go nearly full turtle overbtge second half, we still committed to passing but as in previous seasons when we start out hot over the first half and then collapse, the offense went mia.
Schiel makes no definitive assessment as to why the offense failed, but does state that so long as we don't crawl back into our conservative plodding, running game shell and rather, adopt a new attack that has a more dynamic ground game mixed with smart passing, that we should be able to fix what ails us. But going too vanilla likely won't work as well against contemporary defenses as it did even 5 years ago. It seems now to be the trend for defenses to do what was done to us and sit in high coverage and force offenses to settle for the short gains.
