not to hijack your thread, but..
I think the defense is the key and the ability of the defense to hold teams to less than 17 points a game in this stretch is critical.
If our offense has to score more than 20 points a game to win, our odds of winning decrease greatly.
We haven't been able to generate more than 21 pts a game against any good team this year and won. Except for the Chargers in the 1st game or the Iggles in the 1st game.
So while Drew could hopefully elevate his game, I'm going to assume because BP is going to go with ball control and clock management, field position, running the ball and low risk play on offense..
..that means low-scoring games and close games and that means defense must prevail.
The offense can be expected to do it's 17-20 pts. a game as it's done all year..but the defense needs to keep the opponents at 14 pts or less going into the 4th Qt. for us to have a shot at winning.
I'm doubtful about doing that. That sort of approach is going to make any mistakes offensively magnified such as INTs and fumbles and penalties. Because we'll have so few real opportunities to score because so many of our drives are going to fail as we try to run the ball more in December..
..that's going to put alot of pressure on the defense to win games.
Putting them on the field alot over that period is going to tire them and expose them and they'll probably unravel at some point unless the offense does more than just run the ball 40 times a game at 3 yds a pop.
So I think Bledsoe is not going to be the differencemaker. He's going to be a busdriver along the way with a conservative offense and the defense was supposedly built with the 3-4 and the draft choices and FA signings to carry the load at crunchtime.
Not for Bledsoe to become Peyton Manning.
I have my doubts about it. If the defense leaks and some team creams us good and forces the offense to make numerous mistakes in our conservative approach to moving the ball..
..this stretch run could end early and a desparate struggle to make even 9-7 may set in.
BP is setting things up to make this team gut it out in December and I have my doubts about this team being able to play smash-mouth, mistake free games to get there.
They haven't shown the ability to do that consistantly all year against weak opponents much less the schedule we see coming up.
I'll hope for the best but I think it's a 50-50 chance we don't get to the playoffs. This team will need to play about 50% better than it's doing right now on offense every week to make the playoffs and I'm not sure how that's going to happen.
We'll need some guys on offense to be really aggressive, play calling will have to be aggressive and several players like Julius Jones and Witten and the whole OL are going to need to play like madmen to do it.
I don't see that, yet.
We play from behind way too much and doing that in December will get you killed as other teams are trying to beat us for their own playoff spots, too.
So we'll see..
parcellswaterboy
