Is it realistic to expect the defense to improve even a little this year?

[top dawg]

:lurk5: This is interesting. Brandon seems to know more about football than he is letting on (coach).

I am no genius on the defensive side of the ball, but it appears to me---like I said before---that you have to develop your unique philosophy on what defensive coverages that you deem work the best, try and get personnel that you feel will work well within your system (or at least have the ability to learn and adapt), and then develop your own schemes to compensate for your own players' abilities (or lack thereof) to maximize not only their potential, but the overall effectiveness of your defensive unit. In the best defenses, the coverages/schemes that are used are ones that are well disguised, attacks the offensive backfield from all angles, and forces the offense to show its hand, so you can cause even more problems for the opposition, and mitigate big plays underneath the coverage, and down field. Of course, the whole process is constantly moving, so you have to have the coaches and the players who are very astute at recognizing and adapting to what is going on, and therein lies the chess match.

[panthers55]

They don't dump off. They're not WCO. Trust me, I broke down tape of them for two games this year, they're not a dumpoff team and Warner is not a dumpoff QB. I've shown that they deal in a lot of zone-busting ideals, and sometimes Warner's reads are as simple as MOFC/MOFO.

Granted, again, you're 100% right. Our defense is susceptible to dumps first, tight end second. We've decided these are things you can allow, given that the deep pass is covered and sound defense produces a tackle. If the tackle is missed, that's not scheme. It's error.

You are right that Arizona doesn't dump off to their backs very often, in fact they don't use their backs nearly as much as they should.

Perhaps my usage of the term dumpoff is incorrect. Still with a three and four receiver set they primarily moved the ball through the air during the regular season and used the pass much like other teams used their running game which is a hallmark of the WCO. While they might not be a classic WCO, you and I both know that their are all kinds of hybrid WCOs which use those concepts. They do alot of short passes in underneath routes, flood a zone with multiple receivers, quick outs, stacking receivers to use as blockers etc which are frequently used by WCOs.

As for missed tackles, they screw up any scheme, of course. I readily admitted earlier that execution is the biggest concern for any team. And any scheme is susceptible to poor execution. My question is if you have a player that for example is very suspect in zone coverage but is good in man coverage, while you are working to coach him up to play better zone, why wouldn't you put in situations where he can use his man skills instead of forcing him to play zone poorly. In my way of thinking your scheme is lending itself to poor execution, and you are fitting the player to the scheme rather than fitting the scheme to the player which is what Meeks for example said he would do.

you know you've seen "good" zone play from Trgovac. Me, personally, I'm tired of seeing "zone" being trashed here and everywhere else as if the way we played against AZ, NO, or NYG are "the way zone is supposed to be played" or as if the way that we drew things up was the problem.

Has our secondary been good in zone coverage? If you mean have we not given up a ton of long plays which appears to be one of the hallmarks of our philosophy, then I would agree with you. I don't know that we played good zone in a number of games this past year. Did we do well at times like against NO the first time or against KC, yes. But how about when we played NO the second time or against Arizona either time for example. Sure if you agree with the bend don't break scheme in theory then we surely did bend all the time. The problem is that giving up over 30 points a game in the second half of the season meant we broke far too often.

If you broke down film of our secondary then how many times did Lucas for example hand off a receiver to Godfrey only to find that Godfrey was too far away to make a play. I know that Lucas has to stay in man until Godfrey gets there but it was child's play for the offense to do a high-low stretch which rarely got picked up as a pattern read adjustment by the linebacker essentially stranding Lucas in no man's land. Those kind of things resulted in a number of blown coverages this year.

I was at all the games so I didn't have the benefit of replay or film to watch like you apparently did particularly at home games. Plus watching the game in review is a very poor substitute for actual game or coaches film as you know. But it seemed to me that we all too frequently would try and cover slot receivers with linebackers which instantly created matchup disadvantages for us. Particularly if it was on first or second down and we didn't have Marshall in there who normally played that position in our nickel. Not only did that put our linebacker at a disadvantage for example but it took him out of any possibility to apply pressure to the quarterback unless he left the receiver totally uncovered (which we did on occasion). I realize that is what the defense calls for, but what if our personnel isn't good as executing it?

If a player poorly executes a scheme a lot of time then I don't say it is good scheme with poor execution. I say it is a poor scheme for that player's skill sets. We either need to change the player or the scheme. For example we ran a cover 3 with our corners and one safety deep. Still other teams with inadequate safety play such as ours might consider a cover 4. They all have strengths and weakneses and Fox would never put that many guys away from the line of scrimmage with his emphasis on stopping the run. Plus we would get short passed to death. Still, why continue to run a zone scheme and then fail to put an emphasis on getting safeties with good cover skills who know zone. If we constantly get caught with players out of position or confused by what the offense is doing, then it isn't execution but preparation that is lacking. If we play good zone against a team the first time we see them and then give up a ton of yards 5 or 6 games later it isn't poor player execution all of a sudden but failure to adapt and gameplan for the changes that they made to compensate for what we did the first time.

May be it was just me but I can remember a number of times when it was very clear to anyone watching the game where the ball was going to go and we had no one within 20 yards of the ball. Or we played a cover 3 with corners playing deep on third and 3 where there wasn't a chance we would stop the pass when it was a short slant to the outside receiver.

I'm not ready to say "coaching" wasn't - I read a lot of burnout in Trgovac's description of the last half of the year. I read failure in his words. I don't know if Fox was being too loyal - something he gets consistently accused of - but too often he gets blasted for being the cause of the defensive problems when I don't believe it's so.

I would agree here 100%. Seems to me that Foxy left Trgo alone when the defense was good in 2005 and 2006. He only intervened in 2007 and 2008 when we weren't getting the job done. I don't believe that Fox put in things that made us worse. More likely they just didn't turn things around. And I think he not only has the right but has the obligation to get in there and try to fix things. After all he is going to get the blame anyway so he should do what he can to straighten things out.

But I do believe he is too conservative and needs to be more aggressive in his approach particularly in defense. Not reckless but aggressive. He seems to see them as the same.

[PanthersAlv]

holy crap! I'm SO not that "unbusy" at work to read this novel.

what happened to the smartallic comment/oneliners about Gross' ears and Peppers being a punk now?

My goodness.

(hehe... I'm stealing Mr. Scot's famous "comments on my comments" line here in say'n... I just want him signed and we can move on.)

[Mr. Scot]

I'd actually enjoy sitting down and talking scheme with Magnus, P55, Fireball and others. Just don't have the time right now.

(missing the days when I could internet surf at work)

Edit: What happened to the post by Alverez I was responding to? :confused:

[PanthersAlv]

I'd actually enjoy sitting down and talking scheme with Magnus, P55, Fireball and others. Just don't have the time right now.

(missing the days when I could internet surf at work)

Edit: What happened to the post by Alverez I was responding to? :confused:

I thought i was in the Gorss finalize'n thread. LOL sorry Scotah!