It's been talked about, but I am still just amazed...

[*rfaulk34*]

(03-24-2022, 07:30 PM)fredtoast Wrote: I know I will get crushed for this, but judging Lou's defense based on just two halves against KC is like judging his defense based on just 2 halves against the Jets.  Too be honest I don't really understand what happened in any of those games.  

Claiming our scheme gets the credit for stopping Mahommes is just too simplistic.  The fact is he played terrible for some reason.  Missed a lot of reads he usually makes.  If our scheme was the reason we shut him down in the second half of the first game then why didn't we shut him down the first half of the second game?  

After the Jets game there was a lot of talk about how the Bengals defense had been "exposed" by a very simple scheme.  At the time I did not know exactly what happened in the Jets game. It looked to me like we just forgot how to tackle for an entire game.  But I did not think it was the simple scheme that had destroyed our defense.  And this was proven true because not even the bets teams in the league were able to abuse us the way a back up QB on a last place team did.

I don't want to say our defense "got lucky" because they played great.  But I think it was Kurt Warner who showed a bunch of plays where our defense left guys open and Mahommes made the wrong reads.  There were also multiple plays where he could have ran for big gains, but he did not even try.  I don't know how to explain it, but it clearly was not as simple as just rushing 3 and dropping 8 in coverage. Instead it was just a case of our defense playing their absolute best while Mahommes played poorly.

They're both true. 

They made adjustments and Mahomes missed some plays. It looked to me like they took away his tendencies and he wasn't able to adjust. I'm not sure how much they did similar in the first half when he went off, but in the 2nd half he didn't get outside the pocket as much to make those big plays and he seemed to be locked on to 'what he usually does' and the Bengals played it better in the 2nd half.