To me, I have seen an excellent trend in our games this year, and it has to do with a single stat:  passes defensed.  The first game of the preseason, at San Francisco, we only defensed two.  The second game, at Seattle, we only defensed four.  This was troubling, because with the revamped secondary and increased pressure we were seeing up front, I expected us to be swarming to the ball and breaking up far more passes than last year.  In our historic three-game collapse last year, we managed four, two, and zero passes defensed against Carolina, Buffalo, and San Diego, respectively.  This is in line with our overall stats last year, since we were second to last only to the pitiful Lions with 57 passes defensed in all of 2008.  This compared to the league-leading 125 of the Ravens.

Now, with the third  game(the third game interestingly enough corresponding with the debut of Dawkins), we defensed seven passes.  Follow that with last nights performance, an eye-popping 14 passes defensed!  Average all four preseason games, we broke up 6.75 passes per game, extrapolate that over 16 games that would be 108 PD.  I know, we can't reliably take stats from meaningless games and predict the meaningful ones, but I'm still extremely encouraged by the defense so far.  We've done great job shutting down the run (97.5 yards per game), especially while the first team has been in, and the increased QB pressure and batted passes shows me this defense should be quite improved from last year.