A random thought about practice

I keep thinking about why the offense looks so bad and going over bad games from the past years I think it comes down to one thing. The offense going against the defense during practice, I'm thinking a lot of the plays that have us scratching our heads on Sunday probably look good against our defense, but in reality they don't plan on what happens when guys aren't wide open or big holes to run through. It also looks like the coaches don't game plan but instead run scripted plays on offense no matter what the defense looks like and it is obvious teams have noticed this as well. On the defensive side of the ball they appear to do the same thing, they either line up in man or soft zone, very little variation with almost zero lane discipline. We get stuffed more often than not on short yardage running plays but teams have no problem against our front and that tells me we think more of our players than what they actually are, which is mediocre, Hargrave is good and Heyward is above average and Tuitt is close to, if not, elite and when he is out the level of play really drops off. I'd venture to say we have one of the weakest fronts in the NFL, maybe some don't see it that way but we lose short yardage and goal line plays than most others and we give up gaol line TDs on the ground way too easy, almost uncontested and that leads me to the other thing that may be happening. Just like the Tebow game, the coaches must be worried about the DBs on this team to the point of being afraid to bring up safeties to bolster the run defense, the run defense was getting torched yet we still didn't load the box and even when it was apparent they couldn't stop the run they still kept the DBs off, to me that is very telling, so I'm guessing we look pretty bad in practice for coaches to have no answer, almost like when we play NE and they get over 150 yards on the ground in addition to the 400 through the air.

 

I would imagine at practice they set up situations which reflect the way they expect the opposing defense to play, and vice versa.

There was a team we went up against a few years ago, and all week in their practice they had a guy dressed up as Troy to appear in random places at practice to get the QB used to identifying where he was on the field. Which probably sounds funnier than it was.