Peppers says he wants to explore free agency

[Ruhskins]

Originally Posted by GTripp0012

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.

I just feel that in some games, if we had been just a little bit better offensively, we could have won those games. I feel that in the second half of the season, the offense was unable to take advantage of the few turnovers that we had. In other games, tough stops made by the defense did not result in points when the offense took over. Or the offense could not move the ball in order to run the clock out (although we won that game, this happened during the last Philly game).

Our defense was not great, and I agree with you on that. We did not have the type of defense that Baltimore or Tennessee had, which can carry a team to 11 or 12 wins. However, we did have a good defense that led to 8 wins, while I feel we had an offense bad enough to lose 8 games. Had our bad offense been a little bit better, maybe we could have topped 9 or 10 wins.

There are people here that focus on the defense as a reason for our 8-8 season. And yes, we were probably the worst 4th or 5th ranked defense. However, if it wasn't for this defense, we could have gone worst than 8-8. Yes our defense needs to be addressed and improvements could be made. But let us not forget that major things need to happen with our offense. Otherwise, I don't think the defense can carry this team any longer.