Peppers says he wants to explore free agency

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by Ruhskins

If our offense would have been average, we could have won more than 9 wins. Arizona didn't have a top 10 defense, yet they are in the SB. We had a very good defense, but did not have the offense to compliment it. AZ has a very good offense, and their defense got better and were able to beat all these teams during the playoffs.

I bolded this because it's a very good point, I feel. Sometimes, if poorly talented defenses can stay healthy through the whole year, 4-5 months is just enough time for the talent to bubble to the top, and problems that seemed like they would just make a one-and-done playoff teams, they tend to go away "at the right time". So, I think it's a good point that if you build the offense, the defense can come at the right time, regardless of how much you did/didn't invest in it.

But I have to disagree with the rest of your post. The difference between Arizona's offense and ours was philosophical, not necessarily inefficient. Arizona needed to score points to outpace the defense, while Washington prefered to keep the ball on the ground and speed up the game.

Was Arizona's offense better than ours? Yeah, I think I (and everyone else) would say so. But it's not a good comparision, because Arizona's offense was NOT as good as Atlanta, New York, Miami, when you consider the philosophy and the turnovers. Arizona offense, for most of the year at least, was closer to us then it was to the elite offenses. They still managed to win 9 games though.

I also can't wrap my head around the fact that an average offense would have resulted in a 10+ win season. I mean, you can rank our defense a bunch of different ways, none of them are particularly impressive to me. They are 4th in some rankings, 5th in others, and it's probably the most mediocre 4th or 5th in NFL history.

Not to say that defense wasn't the strength of the team, but it (as you mentioned) was an 8-8 team, one with poor special teams, and an offense that was hardly inept, even if all of our games were low scoring.

I would say if we had a great defense, we would have won 10-11 games by playing ball control offense and improved special teams. As it is, we were decent there, and won 8 games, which is about what I expected considering our pythag stats.