I am not certain why we elected to go with a two deep shell coverage against Philly. I know that there has to be a logical explination but I don't know what it is. We did not do ourselves any favors by not executing our offense either. We all saw the first quarter and we all know that the turnover by Bennett was a killer for us but even had that not occured, we could not stop their offense. I think that we are going to seriously need to look at getting a player at NT who can cave the pocket. The way to beat Vick is to force him to scramble to the outside. Their offense is such that you must use LBs to help in coverage. They simply have too many good skilled players. When you do that, you can not allow lanes in the interior of your defense. Especially if you are playing both safeties deep. Last night, I watched our interior defense get handled and in many cases, get handled because they took themselves out of the play. No Discipline by our defense to say in lanes. Terrible tackling by our team as well. Once we lost containment discipline, it was simple for Philly to pick up 1st downs. They attacked the middle of our defense all night. The situation only got worse once Lee went down. We can not cover using Brookings and James. It's as simple as that. The worst part of this is that now, the rest of the league has the blueprint for how to thrash us. Of course, you have to have the personnel but assuming you do, we will see this same thing over and over again.
Offensively, we were not very patient. I know that we were down almost immediately but completely abandoning the run is about the worst thing you can do against Philly. For the last several years, we have kinda felt as if the problem was Tony and his decision making. There is a bit of a problem there but I don't believe it is as big of a problem as the one that we really have ignored for the most part. We can not simply try and throw our way out of situations when we get behind. We make a practice of throwing the running game away any time we get down. That is all on the Coaching Staff. We were down by 14 points in the 1st quarter and we had a chance to settle down and gain control of our own situation. We did not do that. We should have, IMO, continued to run the ball. We were having terrific success running the ball. 7 attempts in the first half but only 3 in the 2nd quarter when we needed to stop the bleeding and give our D a chance to regroup and make adjustments. We averaged almost 11 yards a carry in the 1st half. We only rushed the ball 1 time in the 2nd half. This is about coaching.
We may not have won the game by staying with the Run but I will tell you that we would have been better off had we done that. I think we would have found that Philly can not stop the run and eventually, they would have been forced to adjust. Philly always plans to take Witten away from us. That means that they have to take people away from Run support or gives something up against the WRs or the RBs. We all know this. We have watched this for years. You attack Philly by making them pay for what taking Witten away. You attack with your backs by running the ball, throwing the ball to the flat or with the swing pass and you encourage your QB to run when he has the chance to make yards. In this way, you can eventually open up the deep ball. We did none of that and we got what we deserved. At some point, we have to play football like we understand the game. So far, I don't see it but then again, nobody is paying me to coach or play so there is that.
.....got news for ya: as long as their checks cash, it's all GOOD:bang2:
