Oswlek
Veteran Starter w/Big Long Term Deal
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
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I was only responding to the fact that you implied the defense had its ***** covered by the offense. I didn't consider it Anti-Patriot, just short-sighted.
You can criticize the defense for 3 drives. Other than that they were almost perfect.
I think I am OK with a defense that is perfect 70% of the time, no matter what happens the other 30% (again with the understanding that was a very good offense on the other side of the ball getting paid to score on them)
Chicago just played Dallas a few weeks back, and we now know that their once revered defense is no longer very good. Admittedly, some of that was due to injuries in this game, but nonetheless, they have been downright lousy since that game.
Why do I mention them? Because Dallas had the following stats offensively against them in a 34-10 victory:
12.3 yards per minute of possession (mop)
.6 first downs/mop
.98 points/mop
Against NE they looked like this:
13.5 yards/mop
.62 fd/mop
.95 points/mop
Very similar isn't it? The difference, amazingly enough was the fact that Chicago has a terrible offense and NE's is amazing, this keeping their offensive minutes down. What I am saying isn't "short-sighted" in the least, nor is it that big of an indictment of NE's defense. Why is it that hard to accept that NE's dominance over Dallas' campared to their prior offensive stats was impacted by how well NE's own offense played?
Of course teams are likely to need to do even better than they usually do comsidering how potent NE's offense is. And NE is very good at the "slow bleed" type win where they take away what you really want to do and make things uncomfortable, creating drive ending mistakes or turnovers. I am aware of this and the fact that teams often end the game with OK stats but still wondering why they seemed to do poorly in spite of them.
But my original post was in response to someone pointing out how much lower than their averages NE held Dallas. And, frankly, there is no way anyone can reasonably disagree with it.
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