xray":1pznaaoc said:
To be brutally honest ; this 11-5 team plays like an 8-8 team that got lucky . What's to blame ? They just aren't as good as their record . Simple as that .
The decimated version isn't as good. Or you could say we played like a 12-4 team that was heavily decimated with injuries. The moderately decimated version of our team won several East Coast 10am road games. 8-8 teams don't tend to do that a lot. It could be fair to say we play like a 10-6 team that has had a couple missed potential GW FGs go our way.
kidhawk":1pznaaoc said:
I think it's a coin toss between injuries and coaching. When you have injuries, you just have to change up the game plan. Russell Wilson is your qb...use the man to the fullest. We can survive one game against a lesser opponent making a bunch of quick throws instead of running the ball. I think once we lost our RBs, the coaching staff just failed to adjust the game plan. Next man up just can't always apply in the middle of a game.
Makes me think, Pete needs to apply "Next Man Up" to the coaching staff too. Except there, it becomes, "NEXT PLAN UP" for adjusting in-game to situations. In the Cards game, if our PLAN was a player, it was like kept trying to hobble the same ol' injured PLAN out there. Say, metaphically, our PLAN was a healthy Russell, but then he tweaked a hamstring, our first "adjustment" was to put a band-aid on it and hope, and then when that didn't work, our next "adjustment" was to give him aspirin and tell him to "run harder!" Pete would need to adopt NEXT PLAN UP as a part of his program, and cover it with his coaches in their game planning, and their practice preparations. It looked like Schotty, in particular, was at a total loss on making adjustments. This could be Pete's failing, as much as Schotty's, in that Schotty didn't feel authorized to make the needed adjustments, until it was way too late. After all, the team did get within one score in the 4th quarter. All that did was scramble Pete's brain, "It's working! We're coming back!" Unfortunately, as others pointed out, we don't have our 2013-2014 elite defense.
Fade pointed out in another thread how John Harbaugh has an analytics guy (or three?) to advise him on things like 4th down decisions and game adjustments. Perhaps Pete's next "Always Compete!" adjustment needs to be to use these types of approaches and tools more and better himself for game management, as a proactive thing, to keep him from screwing up obvious things like he did on the first 4th down from the Cards 32, where he should have gone for it. Pete's model of this game was all wrong, and he couldn't let go of it to see the reality of how this game would likely unfold, with the injuries and all the backups playing at key positions, and all the O-Line playing out of position.
Seymour":1pznaaoc said:
None of the above. Oline piss poor pass protection was the top reason we lost. Once the #1 and #3RB's went down and the running game lost balance, they had no shot at protecting Wilson.
Any team with a good Dline hands us our ass because of this and it's been that way the entire Pete Carroll era because of the run blocking emphasis.
Dude, sometimes I'm not on board with your thoughts, but this time you NAILED IT. This is the Seahawks story, notably with the Rams from the Fisher era on, and certainly the story of the Cardinals game. How the HELL did we get to the Super Bowl two years in a row, with that crap Tom Cable O-Line? OK, Lynch, the Read Option Run, and Russell's scrambling ability. And maybe Bevell adjusted for that more than we ever gave him credit for. All those failed bubble screens Bevell ran? Maybe that simply showed we had the defense stretched out wide enough they were covering that stuff. Yesterday showed we still have NO ANSWER for teams with dominant D-Lines when our O-Line is less than 100% strength.
