Let's get this straight: Brady rocks. I trust he will do what he can to right the ship.
Our offense stunk, but we all know that Brady does this at least once a year: for whatever reason he chooses a single game to play like crap in, does nothing right, and then comes back the next week to be Tom Terrific. Every year. I can't explain it, but he does it.. it's like clockwork. Hopefully he's laid his traditional yearly egg and it's all up from here.
While last night's problems were clearly mainly on the back of the offense, our defense managed to once again illustrate its biggest problem, and the Jets defense was able to show THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE.
Our defense is way, way too conservative. Worse, it's irrationally conservative, because when we're conservative we tend to fail. We can't do conservative well, yet we stick to it.
I'm talking about the "3rd-and-13 disease" that our defense has.
Whenever it's 3rd and 15 or 3rd and 20, the opposition makes the play. I now consider "3rd and long" to be automatic for opposing offenses.
It's the same every time: our defense drops back and our corners dance around a bit. We decide NOT to blitz (because we can't), and then our opponents make the simple throw and our DBs look like tards.
Seemingly every time. Every game. Season after season.
It's emblematic of a much larger problem -- a complete lack of aggression defensively. We're like a bunch of kittens out there. I watch the raiders play defense, and while they're technically poor, they are aggressive and have been incredibly effective so far. Ditto the Jets.
We need to get a LOT more aggressive on defense. We need to be able to blitz heavily, we need to apply pressure, we need to hit more, fight more. Rodney Harrison knew best how to play defense: full force.
As long as we keep play calling and prancing around like kittens, we're never going to get any meaningful pressure on other quarterbacks, and in a pass-happy league they will continue to pick apart our DBs.... and every time it's 3rd and 16, I'll once again say out loud to my wife "here comes their first down!"
