Originally posted by Rascal:
Originally posted by KegBert:
Disagree with this.
The lack of depth at Defensive line witch killed our pass rush, exposing our secondary and consequently the crumbling of our defense in the playoffs, had way more to do with us losing the SB than lack of receiving options.
I disagree.
Remember, no matter how stout your D is, noone can stop a top offense. We were all taught a lesson, not just through our own experience but other teams too. Bronocs' D was ranked 3rd, well they got burnt by Jacoby Jones. Seahawks has arguably the top secondary and yet they got burnt by Julio Jones and Roddy White. Ultimately, it is not like our D is rubbish, but you need an offense that can put points on the board and outscore our opponents to win. Very often is down to that 1 play and you got to have top weapons that can make that play. Also, what is up with all our slow starts ? Our O needs to go out and dominate from the word go and not let up. And that is how we are going to win a Super Bowl !!
I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
The first bolded part is not fact, its just opinion. Nobody is saying our D is rubbish, we had injuries to our 2 most important players on defense and the rest of the unit suffered greatly. This is exactly what I mean by lack of depth hurting us.
Our D was 3rd in scoring defense throughout the year, giving up only 18.2 PPG. After we where bit by the injury bug late in the year, our D gave up around 30 PPG in the playoffs. A huge drop off directly related to our lack of depth.
On the other hand we didn't have much of a problem putting up big numbers on offense in the playoffs, 45 points dropped on the pack, 28 points on Atl and 31 against Baltimore. To me, Its pretty clear that it wasn't the offense that was our problem in the playoffs, it was the lack of the defense being able to stop the opposing teams from scoring.