CRA

I beginning to think it wasn’t Joe Brady that was the primary issue. It might be the coach that has never seen good offense on any team he has ever coached on any level….

If he was nursing an injury he would be on it I would think.

He isn’t even on the injury report though

then you got guys like LT2 who basically touched the ball 400 times a season over and over and over and over. and you can find guys that barely play and yet can never stay on the field because of injury. if you are going to pay someone carry the team money. Then you got to use him IMO. But we should get away from paying RBs.

Yeah, I was never a don’t run Cam guy. That was the condition I had of drafting him. Run him and let him be special…..and accept he won’t have a long pocket passer career. And while I don’t want CMC playing preseason ball, we paid him a freak a poo ton of money. CMC should get an absurd amount of touches. No point paying a RB and not using him heavily. I generally prefer not paying RBs but what is done is done.

I think there are very few coaches that can resist using true freak shows. a couple RBs fumbled early in the game too. So they went with the sure thing.

yep. This. They ran Josh Allen right into the teeth of the defense once the game had been put away.

7-10 Schedule is too tough IMO to expect much more than that But I do expect them to overall look better than 2021. I expect more of a 2020 feel where they are at least in games but just can't get over the hump.

also helps when Kyler Murray and Nuk Hopkins are taken off the table.

Not sure why, but each calculates plays slightly different. Total defense defines plays as pass attempts, plus rush attempts + sacks. That has us at the 3rd fewest plays defended. Drives Against is pass, rush and penalty. That has us at 7th fewest. So I guess the one I quoted is just official plays in the books. Other must be accounting for downs where penalty wipes it out.

2021 NFL Opposition & Defensive Statistics | Pro-Football-Reference.com That's not how I read this. It says only the Bills and Bears defended against less plays than the Panthers defense. Yet we were 9th in penalties. And it has us at 1028 plays.

Gilmore came in on passing downs and erased people. I still wished we kept Gilmore and let Jackson go. I'd rather Horn be working under Gilmore.

Yeah, it's a message board. I'm not going to breakdown all the other 31 NFL teams when I'm simply trying to drive home a broad and general point. I've always said stats only tell part of any story. we weren't the 2nd best D in the NFL last year for example. That's just bogus even if the official stat line might say it. So I maintain, our D stats likely were skewed last year because of our opponents. That's not trashing the D lol. I think they did a great job given the hand Matt Rhule dealt them w/ Sam Darnold. But they were flawed last year and not great. They were good though. But the eyeball test and the stats show they overly rely on the blitz for pressure, and they struggle with teams built to line up and run it at you. Which I don't have added the bodies to solve that. That nitpicking our D obivously, it was good enough last year pending they had a good O. But they had a comically sad O.

it's not pretzel logic to look at schedules and observe that opponents can skew what a piece of paper says about a team on the year. The schedule is why some foolishly thought Sam Darnold was going to be good early on. It was just weak opponents. Sam was still Sam (which was noted when some were pretending he was good after a couple games) some teams are dealt tougher schedules in terms of defending the run, defending the pass, etc. Panthers had a pretty good schedule on multiple fronts last year vs some other teams.

I might of missed it but I would add defensive penalties as area that needs real improvement. We had the 9th most penalties despite having the 3rd fewest plays run against us.

Any of those guys would have been better than Rhule. and if you wanted to lure someone out of college, Matt Rhule wouldn't of made the top of my list there either.

I don’t think it is bad. I think when people start leaning on that “2nd ranked D” narrative that it has to be discussed that it would be very hard to call us the 2nd best defense in the NFL. It’s one of those the stats aren’t telling the truth scenarios IMO. I think the D did very well given the cards dealt against them last year. And Sam Darnold is the worst thing a coach could do for a defense. I also think there are concerns going into this year that we can talk about. Instead of the run defense, I’m probably more concerned about how we overly rely on the blitz for pressure and lost our best pass rusher from last year. We are a Burns injury away from being in potentially big trouble.

Eagles also have a non traditional run game. Hurts lead them in rushing. I think we struggle with teams that have the talent to line up and run at you for whatever that is worth.

Issue with using Horn as a metric is he was only with his for 3 weeks vs slop opponents.

I mean SOS exists. And you can break that down further and talk about specifics about opponents. Some years teams get slated to defend brutal pass attacks. While some simply don’t get that schedule. Lot just comes down to what year it is, what conference and division you get. Luck of the draw. we had a schedule last season IMO that made Sam look better than he was early and one that overall likely inflated how good our defense was. look at the QBs we faced last year. Lot of teams had it way worse and we had tons and tons of gifts. We had a great ratio of bad QBs vs good. You don’t get it like that every year.

Only one man can stop them

We can just name them. I think the Jets, Hou, Miami, Falcons, Giants , Bucs etc overall largely just weren’t very good teams running the ball. You want to argue they simply played great run defenses all year and weren’t weaker rushing teams? eyeball test matches up IMO

I would assume majority of teams didn’t get a schedule stacked so heavily with so many bottom dwellers like us. It was a pretty good schedule to be light on run defense IMO. Just the luck of the draw. I mean, some teams get tougher opponents, offenses, passers, rushers, whatever on the year. We didn’t have a bad schedule last year.

I largely go off what my eyes tell me. Stats generally never tell the full story. I’m not making any real declaration outside of I think our opponents likely inflated how good we statistically might of appeared on paper.