11-29-2021, 01:43 PM
(11-29-2021, 11:27 AM)fredtoast Wrote: Defensive yardage stats are often dependent on how well the entire team plays.Exactly. There's been a few games this year teams have padded their pass yards against Cincy with dump offs late in the game and or against Cincy back ups playing the 4th quarter. 1st Pitt game they added a lot of yards dumping it off down the field on their last 2 drives which was over 100 yards. That is Pissburghs only 300 yard passing game of the year. Yesterday got a lot late against back ups as well.
A team that is ahead a lot more will give up more passing yards because the opponent is passing more. Only 5 teams have faced more pass attempts per game than the Bengals. So that is a big reason we are 25th in pass yardage defense. But in "pass efficiency rating" we are 9th (88.4).
On the other hand we rank 4th in rush yards allowed per game, but that is mainly due to the fact that other teams have not ran the ball much against us. If you look at "yards per carry" we are just 13th.
...................tot yds.......efficiency
Rush D........... 4th.............. 13th
Pass D........... 25th............ 9th
Only game I recall pass defense getting shredded was the Jets game. A good chunk of Oaklands passing yards came on 1 drive that consisted of 4 passes and accounted for somewhere around 1/3 of their total passing yards. Pass d was awful on that drive but played great rest of the game so yardage stats can definitely be deceiving. If you just looked at the stats in some of the Bengals blowouts you wouldn't think they dominated the game.
1st Pissburgh game we ran like 48 offensive plays. Pissburgh threw the ball more times than that and had around 78 total plays and more than 10 minutes t.o.p advantage. They had over 300 yards passing but alot of that was their last 2 drives dumping it off down the field twice. There's a few other games the stats don't tell the story accurately as well as the overtime games against Minn and GB that don't help the pass yds against per game metric.
Same goes for Burrow, Chase, Mixon, Higgins and Boyd. If you add up all the game time they missed from sitting on the sideline during the 4th qtr of blowouts then I'm pretty sure it would add up close to them missing an entire game. The 2 ot games offset it some but that still leaves over 2 full quarters of time that would make their numbers better. The vanilla plays run being up big in those games before the starters went to the sideline also have an impact there.
Crazy to say that even with pretty good numbers they've actually been playing better than the numbers say they have. I've been a Bengal fan for about 35 years now and I can't recall this many times in a season and maybe collectively since the Sunday ticket era began that the Bengals ended the game with their starters not playing majority of the 4th quarter due to them giving someone a beating this many times.
This team feels different. I thought Taylor was full of shit when he kept talking about culture. I was wrong and It's showing now. This team seems like they're very close, like they play for each other, hold each other to expectations and accountability. Don't want to let their teammates down etc. Reminds me a lot of the Seahawk teams from around 2012 when the legion of boom was coming together before they started fighting amongst each other and it blew up.
