Defensive Observations

[casmith07]

Thinking about the game yesterday without being emotional, I've come up with a few observations that I think are worthy of discussion by some of the football-heads here.

• Defensive Backs: It appears as if a lot of the success that Scandrick had last year at CB was when we moved Newman inside to cover the slot receiver in nickel situations. Perhaps it's time to go back to this formula? Eli Manning didn't throw too many passes toward Jenkins or Newman after a couple of good coverage plays, but he really picked on Scandrick in the slot covering Steve Smith.
• Did we even have 11 players on the field during the Jacobs TD catch? It seemed like the only players we had on the field were Spencer, who blew the coverage, Brooking, who was playing inside, and then Sensabaugh, who was getting held 40 yards downfield. Aside from that one play, however, we got some pretty good play from our linebacker unit, even with the Bobby Carpenter blown sack/Houdini pass.
• Mike Jenkins: appears as if Mike Jenkins is definitely the heir-apparent to Terence Newman's "throne" if you will. While Newman has given us 10 solid years of play at the CB position alongside the likes of Mario Edwards, Jacques Reeves, Aaron Glenn, and Anthony Henry, it appears as if Mike Jenkins is becoming our new lockdown guy. As long as he keeps studying at 0630 in the morning with Romo, and keeps playing smart football, we should be good to go in the secondary for the first time since the mid 90's with the addition of Gerald Sensabaugh (hopefully with two hands next year!) and hopefully the emergence of Mike Hamlin as well as continued improvement by Alan Ball and Orlando Scandrick.
• Jay Ratliff: Ratliff has been a beast at NT this season, and it really showed last night with him being mostly invisible except for a few plays. Why was he invisible? He was double and even triple-teamed on almost every play.

And there you have it. Just some things that I've observed are issues/non-issues in my opinion. I think a lot of the 4-1 and 3-2 predictions to finish the last 5 games of the season partially hinged on beating the Giants, but after watching Washington and New Orleans, it isn't out of the realm of possibilities that we can still pick up some key W's down the stretch and hang on to the division. 2-3 would not be ideal, but might still get us to the post-season. I don't think there's any way this team goes 1-4 to finish up, either.

Time to start checking out San Diego. Sproles is going to be a tough assignment.

 

[CrazyCowboy]

Spencer to me is playing the best of any of our defenders.....yes, I am considering his possible blown assingment on Jacobs.

 

[BehindEnemyLinez]

They need to do something w/ Scan b/c he's playing with no confidence right now! He's been a weak link this whole season and I don't know if simply moving him outside will do the trick (he didn't exactly play lockdown ball when he started @ the beginning of the year). Is Ball any better? IDK but Wade & Campo need to do something to tighten it up...or they'll both probably will be job hunting this upcoming offseason!