Defensive rankings don't mean squat anymore

This team needs to try and stop making sure they have the number one d or rush d or pass d cuz in todays game it doesn't mean anything. The team that scores more points wins. The offense have the advantages nowadays and defenses are handicapped cuz of it.

Pats, Saints, and Packers have great offenses and crappy ass defenses but they won more or as many games as we did. They are putting their money into their offense instead of defense. The days of a run game and defense bringging home a championship are done for now until another genious comes along and devises something to stop all this passing.

We need to invest our resourses in offense, hybrid TEs, scatbacks, superiror pass blocking offensive linemen. This is were this is is right now and we won't keep up until we make that switch.

On defense you need all d-linemen to be pass rushers, u need all d backs to be like cornerbacks, and u need you linebackers to be like safeties, hampton is useless in this league we're in now, woodley is great, but he is big enough to go to end.

In a nutshell the steelers need to change with the times. I love this team and hope they don't stay in the same rut and get passed by.

 

Well 2 defensive stats that mean a lot are sacks and turnovers and we were bad in both areas this year. So while the overall rankings may be misleading some of the stats underneath the rankings are very telling. Either sacks or more turnovers by our D would have been very helpful yesterday that's for sure. This is why you can't just stop investing big money in the defense. Sacks and turnovers are caused by big play makers and they cost money to get and keep and without them you're not going anywhere. Yea it would be nice to put up 40 points a game but getting beat 45 to 40 versus 17 to 10 is still a loss no matter how you slice it.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Pats, Saints and Packers get takeaways on D. That's the new defense. Splash plays... turnovers. Defenses are no longer allowed to pound opposing offenses into submission.

 

you've gotta be a fan of about four years if you're on here pimping our #1 defense.

our defense wasn't that good this season. it just wasn't. it wasnt even a shadow of our blitzburgh teams of the nineties where we were getting pressure the entire decade and forcing turnovers. woodley and harrison (we'll give 'em an injury pass, i guess) were FAR from quiver and quake. our defensive backs make ZERO splash plays. we should have been bringing the heat to tebow all day yesterday. instead, we rushed four and sat back and asked him to make throws - and he did.

letter grades for the year:
hampton: C
keisel: C
hood: C
farrior: D
timmons: C-
harrison: C
woodley: D
polamalu: C
clark: D
taylor: B (in spite of last night's F)
gay: C-

that's the starting lineup of our #1 defense. any arguments there? polamalu being named all-pro was a gift. it was a lifetime achievement award.

this season reminded me of the 2001 season where our defensive ranking was aided by a schedule featuring awful qb play. do you realize who we beat this year? colt mccoy twice (barely), andy dalton twice (rookie), tyler palko (rookie) blaine gabbert (rookie), curtis painter (rookie), matt hasselbeck, kevin kolb, kellen clemens, tavaris jackson, and somehow, tom brady. we got swept by joe flacco and lost to alex smith and matt schaub. and those bums were, somehow, the best qb's, other than brady, that we faced.

i fear this may be the decline of this team. we need to replace a lot of guys. i'm fine with ike at corner. one bad game. but we still need that second corner. i don't think gay or keenan lewis or b-mac are the answer over there. troy, although only a year removed from DPOY, seems to have regressed this season. his concussions are a concern and he's always getting nagging shoulder/leg injuries. ryan clark was terrible this season. farrior was horrible two years ago, great last year, and horrible again this season. timmons and woodley both played poorly this season (but i have confidence in them moving forward). harrison gets held on every play so what difference does it make how good he is if they won't throw a flag? our starting d-line is done. hampton with an acl? his career is over. he's too fat and lazy to rehab that and come back at full strength. hoke, his backup, is done. aaron smith is done (and has been done for three years now). keisel is starting to get a lot of nagging injuries. we've drafted their replacements. we'll see if heyward and hood can step up but we lack a true nose tackle and with so many teams switching to the 3-4 in recent years, it's not as easy for us to grab a stud nt as it used to be. it might be time to move to the 4-3 (that won us four super bowls). i mean, the 3-4 did nothing that it was supposed to do for us this season. our sacks and takeaway numbers were a horror movie.

and then there's lebau. time to drop the 'defensive genius' label if you can't stop, or even contain, tim tebow. he's adjusted his gameplan twice in a decade (2004 pats, 2011 pats).

we need to improve this defense badly. we get vick, brady, rivers, eli manning, romo, schaub, peyton manning/luck, and andy dalton with a year under his belt next year. a considerable upgrade over the bums we faced last year.

 

OMG! That's no lie! He gets choked, or has a make-shift sleeper hold on him, on every play!

Wasn't Tomlin a 4-3 guy as DC? That's what I heard, anyway. A friend of mine says he thinks Tomlin wants to go that way but is respecting LeBeau, right now.

 

Well whatever DL was doing aint workin' Besides who's the BOSS of this team?

 

the talk, when tomlin was hired, was that he was a 4-3 tampa2 guy (dating back to his dungy days).

oh, by the way, dungy got it from chuck noll.

the 4-3 tampa2 was the defense we played during our 70's dynasty.

dungy attributes a great deal of his coaching success to what he learned in his short playing career and early coaching career under the emperor.

the way we've been using our first-round picks on d-linemen in recent years (hood and heyward back-to-back) might be more of hint towards a transition than just suggesting our d-line is getting old. maybe both.

 

I say if Lebeau leaves we make the switch to the 4-3. Move woodley to end, 2 tackles could be hood and keisel for the time being, and heyward the other end. Draft 2 dt/de as replacement for keisel and depth/rotation players, incorporate mclendon as well. lbs timmons and harriason on the outside, sylvester in the middle, for the time being, get a ilb in draft, foote, farrior, hampton, a.smith, hoke all gone.

 

What people fail to realise is the high power offenses basically force the opposing teams to take alot more chances with their own offense, which lead to turn-overs. This has been holding true the past several years. Teams that have explosive offenses and SCORE points tend to get alot of turnovers, even if they have a suspect defense.

It is an offensive driven league for sure. Problem is our offense scare nobody. We keep hearing how explosive the offense is, but they are in the bottom tier of the league when it comes to actually scoring points.

I would venture to say that if we were a threat to score every time we had the ball (like NE, GB, NO, etc) we would have had many more turnovers go our way, simply because the other team is always trying to match your scoring and that leads to mistakes.

We played basically the same teams as Baltimore except that we got to play NE and KC and they got NYJ and SD plus they had the advantage of playing our anemic offense 2 times, and we allowed less points than them. What team played a bunch of stellar QBs this year? The 49ers in that pathetic division? Houston in that powerhouse division? So which defense was better than ours? That schedule thing is lame because no team plays top QBs every week.

Fact is no defense will be like the powerhouses we once knew -- those day are over, the rules have changed way too much. Our offense needs to put points up, and especially needs to put up points when given the ball at the ends of each half (we had opportunities both halfs to at least get a FG toward the end).

 

They really don't. Unless you can generate a pass rush with DLineman
you are not going to be successful in this pass happy Arena football league.

 

While I would disagree with a few of those grades you handed out (Clark and Keisel specifically) I pretty much agree with everything else you've posted here.

 

I agree with most of what you said. As much as I hate it, times are changing for the defense. Hampton is useless and the two gap defensive end are going to be useless as well because they don't have any pass rush ability. We need a six lineman rotation with all pass rushers.

 

Scrap the 3-4 now.We need to switch to a 4-3,Make the necessary changes to accommodate what were trying to do.I know,It's going to take time to do that,But we have to start sometime.I think NOW is the time.

 

I heard everyone talk about moving to a 4-3 scheme but i think that would be a disaster. We don't have the personnel for a 4-3 alignment. You need pass rushers at defensive end and we don't have them. You need pass rushing DTs and we don't have any. Have you seen Hood and Heyward pass rush ability? It was evident last night that they have none.
What we need is a modern day defensive cooridnator that can devise some blitz/cover schemes that are effective. I love Dick Lebeau but i think it's time for him to move on.