07-11-2015, 04:09 PM
(07-11-2015, 01:52 PM)RoyleRedlegs Wrote: We've been a defensively oriented team since 2011.
We are designed to win through our defense.
Throttle opponents with our defense and finish them on offense.
The defense SHOULD be better than the offense. The defense SHOULD be good enough to win a close playoff game.
That is how we are built to be. For whatever reason, they aren't. They crumble just like every other player on this team does. Except Leon Hall, he's cool.
(07-11-2015, 01:56 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: The offense has been terrible in every playoff game. Happy? I've never defended the performance of Andy Dalton or this offense in the playoffs. You should know that.
My argument is not a defense of the the offense. I just think it's silly to not hold the defense accountable for their own performance. Especially when the defense has been so bad in pretty much all 6 playoff games, and the problems have been nearly identical in each game.
I think the defense needs held accountable, but I'm just not so sure they've been as bad as people are claiming.
Sure, if you just say "they've averaged X against the run each game!" then it looks much worse than it really is. Go play-by-play in these games.
7 out of 11 San Diego drives ended with 10 or less total yards. People say that the defense "didn't make enough big plays", but...really?! The defense holds them to SEVEN drives of 10 or less yards, and nobody considers that making big plays?! I'm sorry, but that's where I'm losing track of where people are coming from bashing the defense for every game. Yes, the 2 different 80 yard drives by San Diego were awful for the D, but let's not pretend that defenses are going to be absolutely perfect, no matter how good they are.
Some of the best defenses of all time have given up a couple long drives, it DOES happen. When your defense is stopping the other team 7/11 times for less than 10 total yards? That's extremely impressive. People are really underselling the defense from San Diego just because of a poor drive or two. Overall, they weren't nearly as bad as most will claim. The defense WAS our strong point in 2013, and even with a couple of our best players out, we shut down the Chargers completely on over half of their drives. They gave up a whopping 28 total yards on 4 drives in the first half other than the long 86 yarder that SD put together. I can't believe some will say they were worrying about our team giving up 3 or 4 yard runs in the first half when it happened on ONE out of FIVE drives.
The 2nd Houston game was a bit different of a story. They gave up big chunks of yards throughout, but they did a good job keeping the score down. It reminded me a lot of the Bengals D in a lot of 2014. Giving up big chunks of yards isn't good, but you still win the game by keeping points off the board which they did. The offense was laughable in this game. With about 10 minutes to go in the 3rd quarter, do you know how many yards our offense had? About 52....hahahahaha, seriously. 52 yards.
I think a lot of us are on the same page, most of us are blaming the TEAM and not just a couple single players. It has definitely been a ton of team losses, but I'm just saying I feel the offense (not Andy) deserves about 70% of that blame for 2 of those games. If you want to talk about embarrassingly bad defense, we can break down the Indy game, that was BAD. The offense was playing All-Stars like Cobi Hamilton and Rex Burkhead, so you'd think they would have been the weak link in that game, right? LOL, wrong. When you get shredded by Dan Herron, you're gonna have a bad time. Foster ran all over us in 2011 too, so that's another big stinker from the D.
I don't want you guys to think I'm deflecting from the defense or anything, I just want to put in perspective that each side of the ball ****** us on a couple different occasions, and it wasn't necessarily the defense being THAT bad in all 4 games, just 2 of them. As I said in the other posts though, it's not just Andy, it's Gio, Marvin, A.J., Sanu, Jones, Cook, Zeitler, Gresham, Gruden, and anyone else involved on that side of the ball. I put more emphasis on the offense because I think they honestly deserve it.
