Watching the MNF game last night, it occurred to me that both teams came in with very specific game plans and scheme changes to combat THAT particular opponent. In the first half, seemingly everything defensively that Texans did was working against the Bengals, and vice versa. The Bengals took away Hopkins in the passing game and made Cinci run. Texans took advantage of a questionable O-line and tried to flush Red Rider from the pocket where he is least effective. I could go on and on. The point is what both team's coordinators did was to forcibly take away very specific players and squelched effectiveness making them try something else, and it worked, thus scoring was at a premium.
We don't do that. If we are trying, it most certainly is not working.
No, what we do is ignore what teams are taking away on offense with an elitist attitude that we can make adjustments based on what JUST happened and just do something else. Instead of going into it with a plan to exploit a particular weakness in the secondary, or linebacking core, we toss spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks because we are trying to force a "we can do what we want anyway" attitude, and it isn't working.
Not one time in that game did I hear Collinsworth say "The Seahawks have completely taken player X out of the game and are forcing the Cards to..." Nope, nothing like that. Our offense is playing on the premise that we just show up and see what happens, and it is killing us. No creativity, no targeted attacks on weaknesses or tendencies, nothing.
Until we use the Holmgren approach that was used against Steve Smith in the NFCCG (05/06), or do exactly what we saw last night on MNF, we won't win with offense. Don't even get me started on the D, but we need to add Wags to the "playing great anyway" pile.