Once again, this defense at it's best reminds me of the Saints defense from last season. They're not going to completely shut you down by themselves on a consistent basis, but they can make timely turnovers that hurt the opposition. Still, though, they have to improve in the amount of yards that they give the opposing quarterback (Flynn was eating our zone alive last night) as well as TD's through the air. As of right now, we've picked the ball off 21 times, but have also allowed 24 TD's through the air. That must be improved if we want to go deep into the playoffs.
When you look at our better defenses over the last decade, we usually managed to hold teams somewhere in the lower 3,000's and usually had more INT's than TD's allowed. As bad as the 2001 defense was early on (a defense which I've seen people here compare this one to), they only allowed 15 TD's through the air to 22 INT's (3,497 yards). The much maligned 2002 offense gave up more TD's through the air than they picked off, but also allowed just over 3,100 yards. In '03, they allowed 11 TD's to 29 INT's. In '04, even with an injury plagued secondary, they allowed 18 TD's to 20 INT's. 2007 was the only year in which we went to a Super Bowl that we had more TD's allowed than INT's, but we only allowed 3,041 yards through the air that season even though teams were almost always playing from behind.
