Our offensive line isn't good enough to be able to rely on them like the Patriots did tonight. I don’t know what happened since September, but if the cowboys run it 43 times on Sunday, they’ll probably gain 86 total yards (unless Pollard breaks a big one). The line is borderline bad.
Our first game in October was against the Panthers, where we murdered the Panthers front. Zeke and Pollard combined for over 200 yards, at 7 YPC and 6 YPC respectively. Zeke even had a 47 yarder.
Then we played the Giants and murdered them again netting over 180 yards on the ground.
The Patriots played us decently, though we still had respectable numbers against that defense.
The Vikings was respectable again.
Denver, which starter the trend of losses, we basically threw ourselves out of the game by the first half. You can’t blame the run game, because the second series that got us to the Denver 20 had 4 rushes, one of them a scramble by Dak, meaning 3 designed rushes and one of them was a 5 yards rush up the MIDDLE by Zeke and an 8 yards by TP up the MIDDLE. The next series Zeke rushed for 11 yards up the middle and 8 yards up the middle. Pollard runs outside for 2 and they decide to throw on 3rd and 1 and it’s incomplete.
And so on…
The point being, it’s simply not true that it’s because we don’t ‘run outside’ or our run blocking sucks or has sucked since September.
And again, we facing 8 in the box constantly, the only game that seemed different were the Chargers who play heavy zone and the Saints as well. The latter though have a really good run defense, unlike the Chargers. The Saints basically didn’t need to bring another man in the box it seems to stop the run.