Did Jamal Adams bust coverage on Chase Edmonds’ touchdown reception?

Yes, probably.

This makes it look obvious.

One player is covering no one, not part of the blitz, and vacated the exact spot where Chase Edmonds caught the touchdown: Jamal Adams. He looks around like it was someone else’s fault ...

but who else could it really be? Bobby Wagner maybe. Wagner blitzes but drops into what seems like a spy role. His blitz frees Carlos Dunlap. Even if, somehow, he was supposed to blitz and then drop into man coverage of Edmonds, that would be a helluva a hard assignment, and he would have achieved at least part of it.

While Troy Aikman remarked that Kyler Murray had his pick of targets, and while for a moment or two Seattle’s secondary looked like a soup of disconnected zones, in reality every receiver but Edmonds is covered at least somewhat. Pressure made anything but an easy pass unlikely for Murray to complete. This is a pure bust by somebody.

Adams has the disadvantage of covering J.R. Sweezy. Who was not an eligible receiver. He has the disadvantage of contributing nothing positive to the outcome of this play. Adams has the disadvantage of looking like he’s calling his own green dog blitz.

Now I don’t know and I will leave it at that, but for the sake of an opinion, let’s say Adams did bust coverage.

Damn.

Adams also made perhaps the play of the game.

Murray drew the grounding flag but it’s not because of a mistake by Murray, as coaches are wont to say about penalties, but because of crazy pressure put on by Adams.

If EPA is to be believed, the grounding penalty was worth four times as much as the safety itself. Second and 22 from your own 2 sucks.

The question now is how do we get the good Adams without the bad Adams?

Some’ll think this is lame, and maybe part of me thinks it’s lame too and that’s why I know, but it hit me in an aha moment and I think it may have some general wisdom within it if nothing else.

Adams played for a crappy team. That crappy team without Adams is barreling toward 0-16. They’re super crappy, and they play in New York, and so their crappiness is kind of an event. A spectacle of ... oh, what would you call it?

While he’s our superstar now, this crappy team actually once benched him. Of this Adams said “Yeah, I was benched. They benched me. I tried to anticipate a play ... and I anticipated wrong.” This anticipation seems baked into Adams’ play.

Now maybe, sharpen your pitchforks, but maybe, y’know what I’m about to say it, Adams is attempting to do too much.

It has worked for him. He made himself a star, a star in New York, and then he fled that rat-infested hell hole like a plague gerbil off a sinking Italian carrack. I worked too hard for that joke. Far too hard, and it doesn’t make sense, and it implies Adams is a plague gerbil. I am sorry. Please accept my apology as a show of genuine remorse.

But if I may do something even more egregious than armchair quarterback for a second, if I may armchair coach, perhaps a respected authority who has Adams’ ear can say this, you’re not in New York anymore and you don’t have to put the whole damn team on your back to even be noticed at all. Assuming I’m right and that’s a bust, that’s an Adams’ bust, freelance less, let the game come to you, opportunities to make plays will flow naturally from doing your job. That’s what I think.