Hawkadeus":bz06e5cs said:
We played great for one month, then crapply for one month. Which should be more applicable right now? Im sorry, but for me, its the most recent one. Just as I would be saying if we played one month of crap defense followed by a month of great d. Which is the case for our offense. I dont know why one would try to fight against trends and say that we should assume current trends mean nothing and that we should go with what was happening a month ago. only reason is foolish homerism. If you disagree, then you should not be buying into the Hawks offense improving. Because who cares about the last month. the previous one is what matters most. Right?
Results based analysis is giving you diarrhea of the keyboard. Look at the individual and collective matchups to forecast, not what happened last game. Trends don't mean a damn thing, it is all about the matchups.
For instance, did we actually play bad D against the Patriots, as you say? I recall a D that stopped the run fairly well, dished out enough hits to give Patriot receivers short arms as the game wore on, and stiffened in the redzone and at the end of the game on Brady's last two drives. Go to the box score and look at Brady's yards and you will hiccup, but then figure out his YPA and understand that we got them out of their game. It was actually a good defensive performance. Because we won enough matchups.
Then the Niners. Gore had two really good runs and a handful of decent runs. Give him and them credit. How many points did they get in that game? 14? And Alex Smith looked terrible? So why did they run so well? Look at that offensive line, which is the best run blocking group in football. The simple fact is that you can cry about bad run D all you want, 14 points says that our offense lost that game, not the run D. Our receivers faced a D as violent as ours, and they got short arms. Don't pin that loss on the D. But we did lose too many individual matchups, thus Gore's run totals.
The Lions game certainly didn't feature much good running by the Lions, but that is one loss you can pin on the D. That was a legit 28 they hung on us. Still, we were one defensive play away from stealing a win. But in choosing to shut down Megatron, we put our secondary and linebackers into some unfavorable individual matchups and gambled wrong on Stafford's supposed impatience and desire to throw into the short middle.
And then the Vikings. Yeah, watching us get gashed by purple Jesus was tough, but we lost a starting LB early in that game. I don't think Jason Jones being gone had that big an effect beyond keeping some of of our other DT's on the field a bit too much, but look at the matchups. Loadholt can't pass block for shit, but he can single block Red Bryant. He's good. Mebane's penetration actually worked against the Hawks, it created cut back lanes that only scatbacks should be physically capable of exloiting, but hey, purple Jesus. Kalil was in the 2nd level constantly too, and actually had one of the best performances of the week according to Football Outsiders. We lost straight up matchups. Get your brain off the yards, look at the matchups. We didn't play terrible defense, they played great run offense. How many teams are built to do that? Not very many. There is no trend, though.
Now look at the Jets. Can Shonne Greene exploit a cut back lane? Not really. Do their tackles road grade like the Vikings? Nope. Does their center guard combination do a good job of creating run space in the middle? Kind of, yeah, but not like the Vikings or Niners. Our Run D should win the matchups this week. Does that mean some trick play with Tebow won't gash our run D? Does that mean that if Wright can't go we might surrender a couple of run plays that look bad? It just might, but over all we should stop the run against THIS team. And once the Jets go one dimensional, they are toast. Because there are no matchups that favor them in our secondary.
