DC Patrick Graham understands The Standard

So again. You are telling me yards are more important than how many points you give up ?
Tell me how points given up, sacks, and forced turnovers are cherry picked stats on the Defense.
You know I can only find one thing that all top 7 teams had on Defense that everyone of them had a winning season, and made the playoffs, and that is turnovers. All top 7 including us had a winning season, and made the playoffs.
That would be like saying TDs thrown by a Qb is a cherry picked stat. LoL

 

i just hope they don't go back to the standard that was.

 

This so true, turnovers are the key in the modern NFL. You just cant shutdown opposing offenses week in and week out, they are too good. The Steelers havent really been suffering from bad defense, eventhough I think Austin was a terrible in-game coordinator. They really suffered because our offense has not been able to consistently stay on the field.

 

Are you aware you can poke on the headers and it will sort accordingly

PTS/G for example which is the only important stat

They are 17th

 

Ok, I get that, but You tell me honestly, and truthfully which is more important on D for winning... the less yards the Raiders gave up, or the less points, more sacks, and more turnovers that we got. Be honest.

 

Did you ever notice wins and losses on the season are based on points

One stat

 

And you can't be terrible at getting off the field.

Games are usually won on a small number of very impactful plays.

But only if games are close enough for those small number of plays to matter.

If you can't stop teams on 3rd and 4th down (and I'd argue each one of those 4th down conversions is impactful), then the game won't be close.

Or (as was the case against the Pats and the Colts) you need a large number of turnovers to just win by one score. And even the best defenses can't count on getting 4+ turnovers consistently. My guess is that doing it twice is pretty rare...and we needed both of those wins.

Note: If we would have lost those games (especially the Pats game), I would have blamed the offense. If you can only score 21 and 27 points when you get 5 and 6 turnovers...well, it's your offenses fault.

 

In single games, turnovers are going to be the most important thing (2nd to points and of similar importance to explosive plays).

Across a season, turnovers are still going to be more important as long as you aren't terrible at getting off the field.

When you are terrible at getting off the field, that's really bad.

You can tell the impact of this because we were a (slightly) below average defense by points despite being excellent at generating turnovers (4th). WHY? Because we sucked at actually stopping teams (28th in yards because we really sucked on 3rd down...and we were even worse on 4th down).

I don't understand how you can keep arguing that it doesn't matter that we were brutal at getting off the field. If we were just average at stopping teams on 3rd and 4th down, we would have been above average (probably well above average) in points allowed.

Points allowed is really, really important. Because point differential is how you figure out who won the game.