(Yesterday, 02:53 PM)coachmcneil71 Wrote: Pretty much agree with this. Losing Bates has been much bigger than many realize. I live in the NFC South viewing area and I watch a lot of those teams games.
Losing Bates and Reader is looming large. Injuries to Rankins and Hill make it worse. The fact that the defense doesn't seem willing to tackle ball carriers makes it really bad!
I know front office cut some defense knowing they had to pay Burrow. They also let Mixon and Boyd go and really as yet have not signed Higgins or Chase long term. What front office did was spend more money on O Line. The question is, are they getting their moneys worth at O Line ? Anyway, back to Defense, they let some key D Players go, and it shows. Patriots ran at will on our DT's. Washington has a good young QB, but Bengals were the first team he lit up with his arm. OK, he can run, but Bengals DB's were toast out there. That was very bad secondary coverage all night long.
Zac loves 5 DB's 80 % of the time. So Bengals are pretty much a 4-2-5. 2 LB's and 5 DB's. What helped was Bates was kind of a LB type in the secondary. If you are only going to plat 2 LB's. then you better have a Safety who is able to be an LB on run plays. Someone on here just posted that Bengals Safeties are not very good. See, if that is true, that just kills only playing 2 LB's. In this Zac system, it only works if you have top notch Safeties. They have to be very good at helping the cornerbacks, but they also have to be good at helping the linebackers.
How Do You Fix It ? I always go to Defensive Guru Tony Dungy. He took awful Tampa and made them good with Defense. He took not so good Indy Colts and went Super Bowl with Defense. On taking over Indy, he said The Colts were too slow on D. Dungy brought in fast players. At Tampa and Indy, he believed a Defense has to be Fast....Maybe the 0-3 Bengals Defense is too Slow to the ball. When in doubt, I always look to Tony Dungy who built great defenses by refusing to have slow players. Dungy always had a monster at DT, such as Warren Sapp who nobody wanted to run up the gut on. Those Tampa and Indy DB's Dungy had were super fast.
One play Bengals were burned on the safety came up as a linebacker thinking run play, and so he wasn't back to cover the pass and the receiver was too wide open. TV announcers highlighted that.
Someone suggested we only got Bell back because other teams think he isn't good anymore. If that is true, that kills the excitement of getting Bell back.
The Super Bowl year we had big defensive tackles playing like Super Bowl defensive tackles. We had a Super Bowl group of defensive backs. It's not Hendrickson's fault if we don't have the good DT's or good DB's anymore.
They took payroll from The Defense and spent it on big name O Linemen. I'm all for blocking, I'm just not sure they ended up with a great O line. I'm positive they cut D Player payroll to go get free agent O line Blockers. Maybe they cut too much D player payroll. We don't have one monster up the gut at DT from what I see, and the secondary looks like the days of Toast Jones because he gets burned so much type players.
A lot of the Super Bowl Team Defense is gone. The guys out there now, at 0-3, they ain't no Super Bowl type Defense. More like that D in 1987. Blake got benched and they put in Boomer Esiason and they also put in Corey Dillon and they could score points. Problem was the Defense gave up more. No matter how many points Boomer and Dillon put up, the Bengals Defense gave up more. Sadly, the 2024 Bengals so far remind me of the 1987 Bengals. If you score 50, the Defense will give up 60.
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