[Lotus]

Originally Posted by NLC1054

There's a reason we didn't stretch the field last night.

The Colts play a Tampa 2 defense. The strength of that defense is defending the deep ball. Two deep safeties, one deep linebacker, and rush with the front four. The weakness in the Tampa 2 defense is short and intermediate, particularly over the middle. Which is the part of the field the Redskins attacked over and over again.

You guys don't remember the Colts game last year? The go route with Banks? The deep pass attempt to Armstrong? They're always ready to defend the deep ball. They could've tried it, but the chances of completing it wasn't much. So why take a shot deep when they're giving you the short stuff and leaving the middle of the field open for you, not to mention they're having trouble stopping the run?

I guarantee you, if the Ravens try to crowd the box to stop the short passing game, Beck will have no problem chucking one deep, provided he has the time. The weakness of the Ravens defense is still in their secondary; they bought in Bernard Pollard, but he's like Landry and has issues covering, and they'll likely be starting Jimmy Smith, who was worked on by Dwayne Bowe.

As for red zone production, if Sellers doesn't get accidentally tripped up, it's a touchdown. I think there's like, five teams who made the playoffs last year that had an even worse red zone conversion rate than we did. I saw some good red zone plays called in the regular season at the end of the year, particularly with Fred Davis. You don't want to tip your hat to that too much, though.

But we didn't have much of a vertical dimension to the offense against the Steelers, either. If memory serves the longest completion was a catch-and-run and generally shots were not taken down the field. Maybe this problem is an artifact of circumstance. But if we don't take occasional shots, over 16 games safeties will cheat towards the line and the running game will suffer thereby.