[papabear]

Richard Smith is a popular whipping boy these days, and rightfully so. I said last year that with all the injuries it was fair to give him another year. I'm willing to let him have the full year. I'm not confident that he will make me want to keep him, but I don't think that a mid-year change will do any good at all...so we're stuck dancing with who we brung.

Even though I'm not happy with him, I think some of the whining about him is unfounded. He has blitzed more this year than last. He's tried some different looks...Mario with his hand off the ground for one. I hate seeing him in coverage, but if they are ever going to create any kind of confusion with a front like that than the offense has to know that the pressure could come from anywhere. That's probably a bad example, but I do think he's tried different things. Besides, other than a handfull of teams (Patriots and Ravens used to), most teams line up in their base front a vast majority of the time anyway. I'm more concerned with what we do once the balls snapped. That's hard to see from the couch, at least in the secondary.

The fact is we've had plenty of chances to make plays on defense. We've had good coverage on a ton of pass plays, but the corner/DB never found the ball. That tells me that we had the right scheme called to cover the play, but the guys in the field didn't execute. Of course, That's not always the case, but I've seen it many times.

Everyone has been screaming about all the quick slants the Jags ran, and how we never adjusted to it. We have no idea what the adjustments Smith tried to make were. It's pretty easy to tell the CB's to play with inside leverage or for the LB's to get into the right zone and take away the slant, but it's not that easy for them to actually do it....without getting beat for a big gain especially. I'm not saying Smith made the right adjustments. I'm saying I have no way of knowing what he adjustments if any he tried, or if the players just weren't executing.

On the Garrard Scrambles, they didn't spy with a LB (my guess is so they didn't weaken the coverage) but on Garrard's touchdown, Okoye didn't even try to penetrate. He basically just stayed at the LOS and spied Garrard. Of course he wasn't fast enough to get Garrard when he broke outside of him....but it made me wonder if the D-Line was supposed to be playing contain and the end on that side didn't do it.

We might be the sloppiest tackling football team in the NFL. It's a teamwide dilema. Demeco made a poor attempt at a tackle that would have been a short loss, but went for a big gain. I'm not picking on him, but when best tackler is whiffing you know you have a problem. It amazes me how many yards we give up by wildly diving at guys legs instead of keeping our head up and making solid form tackle. It guess you could say the players aren't buying in because they don't believe in the defense. I would hope that personnel pride would be motivation enough for them to step up.

I think we've got major problems with our defensive coordinator as well, but there's still plenty of cases of guys just not getting it done.

We've had a brutal three game stretch on the road. Before the season most people acknowledged that with our schedule 2-3 was probably as good as we could hope for after the first five. That was before ike. It will be hard to do that now, but I'm not ready to write this team off yet. We gave one away to the Jags, and despite the final in Tenn, that was a very winnable game. We can't afford another division loss this weekend if we want to keep any playoff hopes alive, but I still don't think this team is as 0-16 bad as some people seem to think.