Jeebus, but I do get tired of these threads. :bang2:
I liked what we did today. Bring in Henry and Burnett and let Roy and Ayodele get some rest. Better coverage and still solid against the run.
If Roy and Akin get more rest and are more effective when they are in there, it will help out their productivity when they do play. Plus, it will take away from something that all teams try to do to us with their offense and puts better coverage in those situations.
We wouldn't be able to do that if we hadn't gotter pretty good coverage out of Reeves. With him playing better than expected, we can afford to let Henry play elsewhere and get Roy out of those crazy (for him) situations. It speaks volumes that Phillips will use Henry to replace someone else other than Reeves. He must be doing a pretty good job.
However, Roy isn't a bad player at all. He's just the guy teams target in their passing game, so we see him allowing passes more often than anyone else. I know they wouldn't target him if he always had good coverage... but they target him because he's the
weakest coverage guy that's in there for us.
Remember when Kevin Smith got a reputation for getting pass interference penalties? It was around 95-96... somewhere in there. Well, after he got that reputation, teams would always try two or three deep passes against him per game and it never failed... he would either allow the completion or get a penalty. That didn't happen a lot at first because he wasn't so much of a target at first. Once they realized teams had success throwing deep against Kevin Smith... every stinking teams would try it.
So he was targeted a lot and so gave up a lot.
Look at it this way with Roy: Teams are going to allow
some passing yards, we all know that. Two hundred yards is a pretty average to below average amount for your basic QB. They have to get those yards somewhere. Now, if they target Roy... it stands to reason that a decent amount of those passing yards will come against Roy.
I like that we're removing him from some packages because teams already know a big part of their gameplan when they're sure that Roy will be in there covering. When he isn't in there, however... they either won't know who the weak link is, or they'll have to figure it out. Either way, it screws up one of our enemies biggest parts of their gameplans.
Eventually though, they'll figure out who our new weakest link is in coverage and begin to target them... which will probably be Reeves. Then, he'll give up a lot more and everyone can start threads about what his trade value might be.
Bottom line is that it's silly for fans to get upset because we allow some passing yards. Like I said, my God... we're going to have to allow some passing yards because nobody shuts down today's NFL offenses.
$0.02
