Quote:
Originally Posted by an23dy
You don't understand. I'm trying to say your stats are arbitrary. You choose which stats you think are important, but if you're at the top in most stats then there's a reason for that and you've got a good defense no matter what nitpicking you may do. When it comes down to it, we played Philly twice, same number of drives, same opportunity/field/conditions and we beat em twice and our defense outplayed them twice. And if you don't think so then you didn't watch the same games as me.
Also, Tampa's defense isn't what it used to be and neither is Chicago's. By the end of the season Tampa's defense was getting torn apart. Tampa Bay had an easy schedule. I thought the NFC South was overrated and they played the AFC West and NFC North, which is probably as easy as possible. Chicago gave up almost 50 more yards a game than us and more than 3 points/game.
I would rank our defense about 5th. I think Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Tennessee were better over the course of the year, but anybody else I think the Redskins were better than. The only reason others don't is because the Redskins defense doesn't get media attention because they haven't historically been a great defense and their fantasy football stats aren't that good because they don't get TD's and turnovers.
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Alright, I understand. Nothing I'm doing is arbitrary, it's all quite straightforward, but you don't see it the same way. Gotcha.
See the problem with Philly vs. Washington determining who has the better defense is that: 1) if there's only two teams in the entire population, nothing can tell the difference between bad offense and good defense. You saying that our defense clearly outplayed their's might just be their offense getting clearly outplayed by ours, and 2) there's 14 games that you're just totally ignoring. Not arbitrarily, but as I said before, you aren't actually backing what you think you are backing. Because no one agrees with you that the other 14 games shouldn't be counted.
The Redskins were top ten in most stats, and are
probably were a top ten defense when you get right down to it. But what if I say, and defend, them being the 12th best defense? There's nothing arbitrary about that, it's just a ranking based on evidence. Furthermore, there was such a huge, undeniable gap between us and the five "elite" defenses last year, that when you start to establish an NFL average defense from the 2008 season, it comes out somewhere around the 10th or 11th best team. Just because of the obscene quality of the defenses at the top of the list (obviously, the best in years). Again, nothing remotely arbitrary about that, just standard normal distribution.
I think you have no idea how good Minnesota and Philadelphia's defenses were last year, and any argument that suggests we were better than them last year is going to be arbitrary and circumstantial, because there was such a huge chasm between the two. I guess that's just my opinion there, but it just not a strong argument to say that they were in the top five last year defensively. Let's face it, if we had a top five defense, we would have made the playoffs. Every one of my top five defenses did make it, and none of them had any more offense to note than we did.
Again, I think you can debate if they're 6th or 11th or whatever. You can say, "we have a better defense the Giants", and I can respond "even though they create turnovers and we do not?" and you can say "yes" and that's that. I would just question who the one picking the arbitrary numbers is right now.