I understand that this week, we are going to be calling out the defence, and rightly so with how poor the defence was. Let's be fair and objective here. 1. A horrible defence isn't going to go from record breaking in a bad way to the Doomsday D in one game. That's unrealistic. I already litigated part of the issue from the game in a previous post, so I will not do so here. 2. That load of Ricard and Skatabo is going to be a problem for more teams than us. I'm curious how the Rams handle that, especially sans Myles Garrett.
However, there was ONE thing I noticed on our defence that I liked, and I don't think it's been highlighted by others yet. Consider it a tiny diamond in a whole load of rough, and my attempt at pulling something positive from last night. I noticed that we forced at least 3 fumbles and nearly had a pick or two (with one fumble being recovered). To me, those are decent building blocks. To me, I like that the players were trying to attack the ball. I'd love them to stuff the run in the backfield and focus on that, but, I don't think I saw them attacking the ball last season like I saw last night. I think on another game, more of those fumbles would go our way. I also thought we got a bit unlucky to not pick off the one where Nabers fell. I also thought we were incredibly unlucky with where the ball wound up after Downs clobbered Dart. That's one that, on another night, we probably intercept.
So, while there's rightfully a lot of negativity towards the way the defence looked, I do think they got a little unlucky with some of the bounces on the fumbles/loose balls, and I do want, as a fan, to encourage the team to keep attacking the ball. We don't need them to become the Doomsday D yet. We just need them to attack the ball and get in position to recover the ball when the ball pops loose. And I hope we send more blitzes with Downs. That hit on Dart was beautiful. We need to do that more.
