A Ninja In Our Midst???

When Stephon comes back it will.


Javon has acutally been playing out of his mind in spite of the lack of production on the stat sheet.

 

I agree totally about the TE. I was thinking the exact same thing last night during the game. Kelce could give us fits if him and Smith are on their game and especially now that the Hill kid has broken out. At least Gronk is done though. We have no answer for him whatsoever.

 

I can't argue with your points. There's definitely some truth to it. Thing is we had more talent available to us earlier in the season. Injuries have started to pile up. We're missing Heyward , Tuitt and Mathews. Not many defenses can handle losing basically their entire d-line. Heyward and Tuitt are easily our best guys up front. Hargrave became a different player when Heyward went down but he's missed some time also.

 

This is a damned if you do and damned if you don't type of scenario. Everybody wants us to start playing rookies all over the defense... then complain when we are bipolar and have big ups and downs.

Part of having a young defense like this is that you will have a lot of ups and downs and big swings in quality of play. We have 3 rookies starting (2 in the secondary) we have second year starters playing two (ones at CB in Cockrell and one at Pass Rusher in Dupree). Not to mention injuries forcing our hand at playing our depth DL players a lot like McCullers, Mathews, Walton and Maxey.

When you start rookies you have to play more vanilla schemes at the beginning of the year. We played the D scheme they could handle. People freaked out. Now that these guys have proven themselves capable, we've been able to add to what we do and get more aggressive. The results have been great, but we're still young at key positions so we still get burned from time to time.

All three rookies look like they could be really good players. They aren't quite there yet. Have some patience and enjoy the ride. This defense will only improve. Let's hope they're ready to go in the playoffs!