As for the linebackers you are absolutely right! They are poor in coverage (mainly Spikes) yet we still drop them into coverage, they are inconsistent on the 4 man rush, yet we hardly blitz. How can you NOT blame coaching and scheme?
Doc Holiday already touched on part of this. I'll point out the other part, and it's something that's been pointed out seemingly a million times.
Bill Belichick believes that the worst thing you can do is give up the 50+ yard TD. As a result, he schemes to stop the 50+ yard TD. When you've got the kind of poor pass defending talent this team has, that means you will generally need to keep as many people in coverage as is possible. Now, you may not like that style, but it got the team to the Super Bowl last season, so I'll take it.
As far as the broncos you are nitpicking scores, i can show you far more games where Tim Tebow was just horrendous yet lucky then games where he played average enough to win. He did have a good game against the Steelers though. Tim Tebow we all know is hardly an aerial threat that you are making him out to be he was just fortunate enough to be on a talented Broncos team.
I'm not nitpicking scores, at all. You were denigrating the Broncos in order to minimize what the Patriots did in that playoff game. I simply showed your argument to be a poor one by pointing out what you were ignoring.
We can go on all night about whether it is coaching or talent. It is probably both, honestly I could care less as long as its fixed. They brought in Talib to bring in some talent, great, but how bout we try something new from our coaches like blitzing instead of dropping our talented but slow LB's into coverage eh? It's pretty obvious we have a very vanilla easy to read defense, which does nothing to help our porous secondary if the QB has all day to read and throw.
We could go on all night, and I'm sure that the coaching isn't perfect, since nothing is, but the bottom line is that it's a talent problem and not a coaching issue, and all the clamoring for "more blitzing!" isn't going to change that. The reality is that the great defense of the early 2000s disappeared with the defensive talent of the early 2000s. The poor defensive drafting and very spotty defensive free agent acquisitions, from 2007-2009, put the defense into a significant decline, and the team has taken a long time to rebuild a former strength. The team is currently about 1 DE, 1 pass defending LB, multiple DBs, some experience/seasoning, and maybe a return to the 3-4 base away from being a top tier defense. Hopefully, Talib will help with one of the DB spots.
The team has gone to 5 Super Bowls in 10 years, so let's stop with the "Scheme can't win!" and "these coaches suck!" crap, since it obviously can win, and the coaching has pretty obviously been high end during this run. Let's just stay focused on the real problem, which has been talent acquisition on the defensive side of the ball.
