I'm already over the Secondary/Defense

Well Mr. Little, I think you should go and tell all your friends about it.

Excuse me while I check my insurance policy to see if I have "falling sky" coverage.

 

Hmm...


Two preseason games in and we are already panicking?


To be worried about our defense now is the equivalent of being worried if you are cooking your favorite food right despite you having many repetitions of creating said dish. It is pointless.



Besides, key players such as Dupree and Shazier were not playing. Once they come back, expect areas like the pass rush to be improved.

 

The FO had the opportunity to sign any of the fA's listed. There are some obivous ones you can cross off for health or cost reasons but point is...there's plenty that were available and clearly better then Dobbs and most certainly could have challenged LJ for the #2 spot. Even now there are options still available that could challenge LJ. Problem now is the knowing the playbook. So it's a too late now sort of thing but it's something the FO could have prevented. I cannot believe the offense is were it should be given we have a rookie QB taking most of the snaps in practice and pre season games.

Kaepernick is an obvious choice. There has to be more wrong with that guy then just not standing during the NA. I mean dudes beat their wives and kids and still get jobs. We signed Vick for Christ sake.

 

I'm over it. Secondary is still a weakness and elite qbs will still shred it because our pass rush won't hit home. Doesn't concern me as long as

1. Red zone offense/defense is great
2. Special teams continue to improve
3. Run defense is good. I'm talking about YPC, since teams will pass more

In that order is priority for me and we will be elite.

 

Because this is the time to try something different. I thought everyone established last years defense wasn't good enough especially against the Patriots. What do they do in the preseason? Trout out the same scheme and getting torched. What did Butler say in the off-season? We are going to run more man against the Patriots. This is the perfect time to practice it. What are they going to do the same defense until they get to the Patriots and then run more man on a whim? That will work out great.

I'm not worried about the pass rush. I'm worried about the 5-7 yard cushions every play, DBs getting burnt like toast, and not getting off the field on 3rd and 17. It's the same exact defense as last year.

 

Yea I agree the dbs are so bad that we can have the still curtain and it wouldn't matter.

Our D line is great, depth as well. Linebackers have potential to be rock solid(Dupree, watt, shazier) but secondary is putrid.

Gay and cockroach got to be moved down. Our best corner is really good but is probably an elite #2 ceiling.

 

We have practioned this during training camp and showcased this in the first preseason game against the Giants.


Even more so though, the issues have a lot less to do with the available defensive backs we have but more so about the cohesion of the entire unit. Communication and familiarity is just as important as having the right players. Players like Mike Mitchell not being in there commanding the secondary on what adjustments to take is the issue; Ryan Shazier not being there for the front seven the same.



To remind you, this is preseason. Teams are not going to showcase every form of scheme and gameplan they have. Teams are attempting to sort out which players are the best players to help them compete. That is it. Anything else, such as wins or losses with good performances by individuals, is essentially gold.

 

mitchell and moats said that about still failing in communication on defense. we saw this last year as well but we had rookies on the field. golden has to be the field general when mitchell is out and i'm not sure he's up to that task. maybe it is time to move gay back there in mitchells absence and move hilton to the slot to see if it improves. gay knows the defense well and can get them in the right spots. not ideal with him at FS but i don't think he would hurt us either.

 

All the more reason having Mitchell is more of an asset than others give him credit for.


Golden is a backup for a reason. He does not emit the same presence that Mike does.

 

I just read an article on pro football talk I believe that said Tomlin is very concerned about the defense. Matt Simms is a 3rd string QB that should have had 2 TDs. The red zone defense didn't stop them, they stopped themselves with dropped passes, and this secondary, 1st string secondary at that, continues to rely on the other team to make a bad throw or drop a pass. I only mention it because the last 3 years when the secondary looks bad in the preseason and we keep saying, "its only preseason", they come out in the regular season and make mediocre or journeyman QBs look like future HOFers. The part I hate most is the same thing everyone else hates, get a sack on 3rd down and make it 3rd and 15 and if the LBs or DL doesn't make it to the QB is 2 seconds it ends up a completion for 26 yard and a first down and it happens with such frequency it is almost predictable. When it came to the Patriots game, we had a glaring statistic, ZERO passes defended, how does a team make it to the AFCCG with a secondary like that? It happens when you play teams with a lot of mediocre QBs that we were able to out score and by the end of the season with injuries to the DL and no depth we couldn't stop the run very well either. This team needs a solid CB in a bad way, Burns is good but not great and Cockrell didn't even get asked for a visit during FA, that tells you that if the Steelers cut him he would be at home as no other team even gave him a look, we saw why, and while it is early to panic, seeing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity and when the head coach come out in public and voices concerns on his defense, that is even more troubling.

 

golden is the second most seasoned safety we have and has been here longer than mitchell. he should know this defense better than any safety we have and near as well as gay.

 

It actually blows my mind when I here " its only preseason" or "its only vanilla defense", its been the same thing against good QB for years now, and even against some average QB like Mallet. Some need to be hit with a slege hammer to realize that the are not good enough of what we need in the secondary. Same was said of Jarvis Jones and even Landry Jones now, people will always defend some players and constantly make excuses for their poor play. Its okay to say that a player stinks when they do stink. Just my opinion.

 

Agree totally with what both of you are saying. Nobody's panicking at this point as some have mentioned, but it's unforgivable that the front office FAILED to upgrade this unit in free agency and the draft! Our secondary got exposed big time in the AFCCG and we stand pat?! Makes absolutely no sense to me. We talked a big game in the off-season but here we are on the cusp of another season and our secondary is still a major weak link and Ben's career window is closing fast. If the roles were reversed and Ben had exploited the Patriots secondary the way Brady exploited ours, do you think the Pats FO and BB and company would have rested on their laurels and gone into the season with virtually the same inept players? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.

 

Whats everybody in a panic over? these games dont count, they dont game plan for them, they wont show any new schemes they are going to use in the regular season, you can panic if they look bad in the first 4 regular season games that count, if we lost the last two games the boo birds would be out in force complaining about how bad they are, i'll hold off until we put our 22 starters on the field with a game plan, until then this pre season is just a big dose of vanilla, 37 players will be cut in just 13 days, then we can start complaining about the 53 players on the roster and the 46 who will dress and start in cleveland september 10...........

 

The players are still saying they have communication problems.That the game was intense and they haven't fixed those issues .It is not a communication problem it is a coverage problem.

Teams that don't spread this D out and play fast are stupid or they just can't do it . We will be in a shoot out with the Browns and very well could get beat by them.

As I have stated over and over.Ross can't play man.Gay is not good at man.Mitchelle is not the right type of Safety to play man .This forces us to play zone when Teams spread us out . If the QB can hit the open man this D will get torched,the only real hope is dropped balls or bad throws .

This D is not going to get way better when they scheme because they are vanilla because of the talent or lack there of .We can't get creative with blitzes because we can't cover good enough to do so . Anyone who expects this D to magically turn it up are just fooling themselves .

If the talent is not changed by the Browns game look for this D to look bad.

 

what do you mean they stood pat jack? we drafted sutton and allen. picked up a vet in sensabaugh. we have 3 guys that have at least been through the rookie year and two of them were on our PS last year learning. (ducre-dixon) shepard. hilton has been a good find. we had a 2nd rd. pick that had finally gotten healthy. they couldn't know he would be hurt again.

i've not given up on the prior 3 i stated because it seems they have improved from game one to game two. thats what we hoped they would do. we added a guy that also was through his rookie year in malik golden. it's far from standing pat.

safety though is a huge concern for me. we know what we have at backup and we didn't do a lot to address that spot except for m. golden. now since we have an abundance of guys that can play corner and safety, my problem is why not try some of these prospects back there. allen, hilton.

 

I think we need both a outside CB and a Safety . I would take the CB first and this is why. If we had 1 CB who was a true man coverage corner and could guard his man 1 on 1 it would allow us to rotate the zone in many different ways.It would also allow us to call more blitzes by being able to play man/zone concepts more often.

I do agree that we need another Safety as well ,I just think it would be easier to hide poor Safety play than it would be to hide poor CB play.

 

Absolutely hit the nail on the head.

 

I don't know, mac, there just didn't seem to be a sense of urgency in the off-season with regard to upgrading the position. If ever there was a free agency period where I thought we would pursue an upper tier corner I thought it would be this past year. Shoot, I don't even think we pursued a second tier free agent defensive back. We signed Sensabaugh off the scrap heap and a couple of other Antwon Blake types. I have hopes that Sutton will develop into a solid player and the early returns are promising, but Allen is a project at best. We got torched by Brady in the AFCCG and honestly we made several mediocre quarterbacks look like Brady during the course of the season. We knew that in order to take the next step we needed defensive backs who could play man to man and who had ball skills and we just seemed oblivious to that fact.

 

Fair enough ,but my point is the man CB can allow more defensive looks .Those different looks could confuse Brady and his targets and allow our front guys time to get home, but we both agree we must play them in a different way than we have been to win.

 

The only time we've ever had success against Tom Brady is when we've had a defensive game plan heavy on press man coverage. That is not going to change and I'm concerned that we still don't have the personnel to employ that kind of game plan against Brady or any other QB.

 

Yeah I really think the best way to beat "Brady" is to rush him and get him off his spot. The best way to beat the "Pats wideouts" is to knock them around at the line. It sorta both goes hand in hand but I'd say really your chances are at the most optimal rate when you're getting Brady off his spot. Although that is a very tall order because he's really well protected and he's also insanely fast with his delivery. Hence why I would like to see us knocking brains out at the line as opposed to "tackling the catch".