Quote:
Originally Posted by barrett
We ran for 170+ and gave up 19 points. The Defense also gift wrapped the offense a TD and let them play the entire game with a lead. Yates had more than enough help. The problem was his ONLY 3rd down conversion of the game was in the 4th quarter on a ball thrown 3 feet behind his WR that was then caught off a defenders back. He simply cannot put the ball where he wants to and the Colts made him.
|
Yes the running game and Watt were off the charts. But IMO, the OL pass protection (and again the right side in particular) was atrocious and made it virtually impossible for Yates to take a normal 3-5 step drop in the pocket. They had no choice but to run the PA rollouts. As for the WRs going deep and giving Yates an option on those plays, again, the replays I saw the WR either never turned around like they were an option or they had a defender right next to them. This all goes back to my comment that our WRs are below average and can't get separation.
As for the D, yes, they got that 1 turnover in the beginning of the game. But other than Watt playing lights-out, they didn't disrupt the Colts offense nor did they stop the Colts when they needed to. With the us in lead, they gave up a game winning TD to a 1 win with barely over 1 minute to play with no timeouts. And that was after a 5 mintue drive by our offense where they had plenty of rest. That's "helping" the team to win? Pretty much sealed the loss from what I saw. The 19 points the Colts scored were just much them stopping themselves (as well as a missed FG) than our D making game winning plays.
Blame it on TJ all you want, and he certainly had a big part in that loss, but not placing some of the blame on the OL, WRs, the D and the coaching staff is being shortsighted and giving them way too much credit.
EDIT: And don't get me wrong... I'm not saying TJ is great and certainly not saying he's better than Schaub or there should be a QB competition next year. He's certainly knocked Lienart out of a job, but no way is he a better option than Schaub. All I'm saying is the whole team for the most part is playing like crap and there's plenty of blame to go around - not only on the QB. Schaub was probably good enough to overcome some of these weak performances, but a backup rookie QB is not and everyone has to step up their game or they won't win another game this season.