5 Sacks in First Game

[Joelist]

Yes 5 sacks. But you need to look at where they came from. Three were the fault of Perine, Mixon and Sample/Callahan (slash here because Callahan in his interview said he called the wrong protection). Two were on Trey Hopkins flat out. Also it isn't like Burrow was getting blasted back there. 7 "hits" where 5 were the sacks (4 of which were regular tackles and one was a shot he took) of the other two they were impacts but not knockdowns. The rest of the time (as in most of it) he actually had a good pocket to operate in.

So if you are worried about the sacks the areas to address are:

a) Blocking by the backs. We are REALLY missing Gio on this.

b) Trey Hopkins needs to get it together. Hopefully we will see on Sunday that last week was an outlier borne of a lot of rust.

The Tackles and Guards did very well. And let's also remember a run game where the only run for a loss was the Jet Sweep to Chase that the Vikings were not fooled by and loaded up on it. We did not have the issue usually endemic to us where our RB has to fight through tackles behind the line of scrimmage.

So really it is Trey needs to shake the rust or be replaced by Hill (if he is ready) and the backs need to get their act together in blocking - and I am sure they heard about it after the game.