A Very Troubling Statistic

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by TaylorMade21

Be realistic here, our defense was holding their own until Leftwich came in. Blache did all he could with having a banged up secondary. I would put more of the blame on Rodgers for dropping that game changing INT (for sure he would have returned it for a TD) and Fred Smoot getting beat on that first bomb from Leftwich. Their offense isn't too shabby either, we must give them credit. Hines Ward is about as consistent as anybody in the league, and Santonio Holmes is beggining to come into his own as well. Our offense is what cost us the game, for some reason we always seem to stall out around the opponents 40 yard line, just out of FG range. We just need to work on not shooting ourselves in the foot with all the penalties and such.

We're probably one of the best man coverage teams in the league, but playing nothing but man on every third down is going to get you absolutely killed. In the second half, we couldn't defend third down and long at all and it's because they kept a guy in to pick up our blitzes that they knew were coming, and made easy completions against man coverage down the field. It was totally asinine.

We also decided not to cover the running back, which gave them free third down conversions. We might as well have just committed personal fouls the whole night, at least then we would have gotten our money's worth.

And yeah, we defended Roethlisberger much better, but that's on Ben. Blache has to know how to adjust when they switch QBs.