Fade":3ks3lu3i said:
Very odd to see people defend KNJ throughout the year, but now that he's fired now no one wants to stand on the table for him? Where is the anger? Didn't he get a raw deal? C'mon, c'mon, I want to hear the arguments for the 25th ranked Defense via DVOA (by far the lowest ranked unit on the team.) And given their talent at all levels of the defense they shouldn't have ranked so poorly. Which points directly to subpar coaching.
Well, I defended our defense throughout the year and I already did so multiple times in this thread, so does that count?
And DVOA is kind of a bad metric to base our team on this year because our problems uniquely defy the DVOA system because it measures things on a per play basis. Your team is ranked higher if they are more likely to 'win' on every play than not. In some ways, this is a good thing (way more unique incidents to create an aggregate score with) but for a team like ours, it vastly overrates our offense and vastly underrates our defense.
We already know that on any given 'play' our defense was likely to 'lose'. They are terrible between the 20s. Nobody has argued this. They give up lots of yards. But those plays don't mean as much to the result of an actual game as things like performance on 4th down or in the red zone. And our team was consistenly VERY good in those situations. And since we also didn't give up many 20+ yards insta-touchdowns, well, the fact that we might 'lose' the average play doesn't lead to the other team, you know... scoring? That's far more important than how many 'yards' or 'plays' we give up.
Our offense is the opposite. We were basically the three and out kings. But a three and out drive might actually have two 'successful' plays (say, a rush and short pass that total like 7 yards) but fail on the third. Well, in that instance we only had 'one' fail play. So great, we 'won' two out of three plays but the other team still gets the ball. Add on the fact that we could be so explosive (touchdown drives that consist of only a handful of plays), their system thinks our offense is actually 'efficient' when in reality it was very boom or bust (usually bust). On top of that, we were so good at not turning the ball over, we typically didn't get 'punished' by their system the way a team that was as bad as our offense was usually would be because teams that can't sustain drives as badly as the Seahawks this year typically also turn the ball over more.
As I already pointed out in this thread, if our average offensive drive had simply increased from bottom of the league (and by a good margin) to tied for bottom third, the number of drives taken away from the other team would have made our team a
top 5 scoring defense. Our defense wouldn't have had to do ANYTHING to become a top 5 scoring D besides have Russell Wilson throw just a couple of more first downs.
Our defense was by no means perfect but they been scapegoated for our teams woes this year. I'm hopeful our new DC will be an upgrade over Ken Norton, so I'm not like up-in-arms about his 'raw deal', but I flatly reject any argument that our primary problems this year were on that side of the ball.