It Ain't the Defense

Keep hearing and reading people talking about the defense. It ain't the defense. The defense dominated a competent offense for 3 quarters AGAIN Saturday night. The defensive coordinator and the special teams continue to let the defensive personnel down every week.

Special Teams is an F- right now. Luke Paschall, what is going on? Literally nothing coming out of the PR unit. KO team can't stay in their lanes (the most basic teach in the book) and KO specialist can't keep the ball in the field of play.

Lamar, again, goes to a 3 technique late in the 3rd quarter and Buffalo starts ripping off chunks of yardage. Absolutely no adjustments. Just continued the soft zone, 10 yard cushion on the islands, no pressure BS. F-

Offensive play calling in the second half was F- again. How do you get away from the run game up 31-7? Just plain stupid.

Point is, we are WAY too talented defensively to be having these collapses defensively and it's not on the players.

Close to true. It ain't the players. It's the scheme we slip into when we get a lead, and the failure to adjust to what the other team is doing.

This may sound like Captain Obvious, but it was mainly the (not so special) teams. The defense should not have even been on the field when they started to faulter. IMO, the punt returner made some poor judgement calls prior to the muffed punt by letting some of the punts roll by without trying to cover or return them. This put us behind the eight ball as far as field position. The muffed punt seemed to be more of a case of jitters because he was rattled by previous efforts. He seemed unsure about himself throughout the 2nd half.

I think we went to the soft zone because we were on the field the whole second half. They got tired cause we love to giveaway the football

No LM does that. He gets a lead and moves to prevent defense. Watch our games from this year and last with him as DC.

Very frustrating to watch.

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Originally Posted by tailgate_papi

No LM does that. He gets a lead and moves to prevent defense. Watch our games from this year and last with him as DC.

Very frustrating to watch.

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I agree the defense was not the problem. We handed them 14 points, the interception by Zeon throwing the ball away (but not making it to the out of bounds) was a young mistake. He needs to figure that out. The other is Bernard fumbling inside our 20 yard line on a punt. That was huge, I like Bernard back there and he does a good job when he catches it, but 3 fumbles on punts in 4 games is not good. Take those 14 points away and the game is 45-24 and we probably are not _____ing about much this morning.

MAT I agree with your synopsis. As soon as we switched to 3 down linemen consistently we started to give up chunk plays. The damn prevent defense NEVER works! It only prevents you from winning!

If the defense plays like it did in the first half against Minnesota we will win.

Offensively i get so frustrated that we go into playing not to lose at the start of the 4th qtr. All gas no brakes until the final two minutes of a game… Buffalo’s defense on our last two drives were keying on run. We should be throwing short-medium passes to keep them honest and give us a chance to get first downs. The ONLY reason teams comeback in the fourth qtr is because teams with leads start playing not to lose instead of doing what worked the entire game.

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Originally Posted by RaginDave

I agree the defense was not the problem. We handed them 14 points, the interception by Zeon throwing the ball away (but not making it to the out of bounds) was a young mistake. He needs to figure that out. The other is Bernard fumbling inside our 20 yard line on a punt. That was huge, I like Bernard back there and he does a good job when he catches it, but 3 fumbles on punts in 4 games is not good. Take those 14 points away and the game is 45-24 and we probably are not _____ing about much this morning.

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I think the INT in the redzone may have been more on ZC than the out route pick. First of all, awful play call in that situation. Second, (and this is a young WR thing) Harvey has to go fight for that ball on the sideline to help his QB. He looked confused.

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Originally Posted by ManAboutTown

I think the INT in the redzone may have been more on ZC than the out route pick. First of all, awful play call in that situation. Second, (and this is a young WR thing) Harvey has to go fight for that ball on the sideline to help his QB. He looked confused.

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It looked like he might have quit on the route. Regardless, it was a bad play call typical of most of the night.

Can we (and this is an ignoramous, thinking out loud…) go to a 5 man front? 3 DLine with 2 edge rushers? This allows for 2 Lbs to cover the middle in pass coverage or an extra DB.

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Originally Posted by ManAboutTown

I think the INT in the redzone may have been more on ZC than the out route pick. First of all, awful play call in that situation. Second, (and this is a young WR thing) Harvey has to go fight for that ball on the sideline to help his QB. He looked confused.

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Oh I agree it was on ZC. I believe (and we will never know what he was thinking) was that he had the arm strength to throw the ball away (out of bounds), but he was falling off his back foot and throwing it to the sideline.

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Originally Posted by RaginDave

Oh I agree it was on ZC. I believe (and we will never know what he was thinking) was that he had the arm strength to throw the ball away (out of bounds), but he was falling off his back foot and throwing it to the sideline.

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If you watched the game online you can see that the throw could’ve been caught by Williams. He never even looked for the ball. He didn’t even realize it was in the air until the DB caught the ball.