Clever Like a Fox

I think we’ll see a lot of Woodyard this year even when D.J. is healthy (and notice that we opened in a nockel package against Buffalo). I also like having Bailey in the slot in the nickel package. That’s smart. It helps keep our best secondary pass defender and tackler in the middle of the action.

but I don’t think offenses will as easily get into a rhythm against us as they did last year. How well teams run against us in the regular season will be correlated with but not determined by what’s happening in preseason. Some coaches put a lot of emphasis on their players “learning how to win,” possibly to the detriment of coaching and evaluation. We’ve all heard ad infinitum about how Detroit went 4-0 the year they went 0-16 in the regular season. Everybody’s extremely competitive and it probably takes discipline not to get too hung up on winning (the coach, not the players) in preseason. Tebow looked uncomfortable and appeared to be less effective than he was at the end of last season, but he was working on fundamentals, going through his reads and keeping his eyes downfield, and I like that. It speaks well of his ability to concentrate on what he needs to be doing even in the heat of battle, and of the coaching staff for insisting on it. With regards to the defense we won’t know what we’ve got, and how much Fox and Allen are holding back, until they start playing for real, but early returns are at least not discouraging.

if Doom had made progress as a run stopper. I had to wait a year to find out but it appears he has, in fact moreso than I dared hope. It remains to be seen how well he’ll do against more accomplished linemen but he’s definitely improved, and Miller is simply the complete package — run stopping, pass rush and coverage. I never thought Miller wouldn’t be good but I was mildly disappointed when we took him rather than Dareus or Fairley. After seeing him play, however, and seeing how well he and Dumervil complement each other, I’m all in. It won’t be a cakewalk against better teams, but on the other hand Miller is going to get even better and Allen probably has lots of tricks he’s saving for the regular season. We might not have the best defense in the league but I think they’ll be considerably better and fun to watch.

Plan A was the draft and what they had on the roster (“We have some of the pieces already in place” John Fox). Plan A didn’t suit what they were will to go for, so we didn’t draft a DT instead we took the best player available at the #2 pick. Von Miller will show that he was the best of the top 5 in the draft and we have seen glimpses of it in just 3 weeks. Then Plan B comes into effect with the lockout a foregone conclusion with Bunkley, Warren, Jarmon and Harvey. Not all glamor and glitze but blue collar guys that do their job without all the fanciness. Now we go into Plan C which will be waived/cut players on the wire. I think they have studied this pool thourghly and will address several positions of need.

John Fox, Brian Xanders and John Elway has made more logical effient moves in 8 months than has been made in years at Denver…Look for more to come.

I didn’t say anything about no stinkin conspiracy theory. Neither did I mean to imply that drafting a DT wasn’t a priority. What I did mean to suggest is that it wasn’t quite as big a priority as I initially thought it was compared to other needs. If they’d wanted to badly enough they’d have gotten a good DT. I take with a grain of salt the idea that they really, really wanted one but, gosh, it just didn’t work out. Fox is the anti-drama queen and is quite capable of playing it close to the vest and dousing rather than feeding the flames, as witness the way he’s dampened the furore around Tebow while doing probably exactly what he intended to all along. And it makes sense that they at least considered trading up to get Fairley, who is especially noted for being extremely disruptive. Obviously, it would be good to have an elite pass defense and run defense, but you can’t always have your druthers. They had too many holes to fill to spend multiple draft choices on Fairley once they committed to Miller. I do think a dominant pass defense, fueled by an overwhelming pass rush, was his number one priority, for reasons already given plus it best utilizes existing talent (Bailey, Goodman et al) and leverages Doom’s ability by making it impossible for teams to focus exclusively on Denver’s only real pass rushing threat. That doesn’t preclude Miller filling two needs (a very good point) since, as any good chess player knows, accomplishing multiple ends with a single move is a winning strategy. Finally, a run defense that gives up a moderately high ypc isn’t inconsistent with one that’s capable of stopping a short yardage play when it has to. In that scenario penetration is perhaps more important than immovability. And Fox may have felt that he could get a good enough DT or two in free agency, which in fact he did.

well said

A great DB does not a Defense make. Shanny shoulda kissed CP’s back side and built a solid front four instead of trading for CB.

You can see from my recent fanpost that I’m very optimistic about the state of our defense, but I still think we could get worked by the Vikings, Jets, Chiefs and even the Raiders if we don’t get better in the middle.

So far, we’ve dominated bad teams. We dominated their bad OLs and their bad QBs. Nothing wrong with that. But we need to keep in mind that those hacks Fitzpatrick and Jackson were bad enough for us to get more pressures than we will against better teams. Again, nothing wrong with that. But the point here is that a guy like Jackson, with his two starting rookies on the right side of the line and his backup tackle on the left, wasn’t able to stand and deliver even enough to maintain their ability to run the ball. I think they only ran six times simply because the down and distance didn’t allow for them to do so. We can’t count on that every week.

We did give up runs in those first two weeks in limited time. Felix Jones did break off an 18 yard run in just three attempts in that first game (and he had another 16 yard checkdown). The next week, Fred Jackson had a 20 yard run in just four tries and Spiller had a 14 yard run in just six tries.

The pass rush is the real deal and it’s going to make our defense very good, IMO. But our run defense is a paper tiger, IMO. We need an upgrade or we’re going to pay for it.

and it applies even to run-heavy teams. A run-heavy team passes more often than a pass-heavy team runs, but if a running team doesn’t want to face Doom and Miller coming off the edge simultaneously they’ll have to pass more often on downs where they’d normally run. So again, it takes them out of their comfort zone. Another way to look at it is, because of the disparity between passing and running in yards per attempt about two thirds of a team’s yardage will be generated by the passing game. Shut down the passing game and you’ve shut down two thirds of even a running team’s offense.

I think the important point is a strong offense scores on a high percentage of drives, with a high percentage of those scores being TDs rather than field goals. A team with a strong offense might, just to pluck some as-if numbers out of the air, have four long strike (50 yards or more) TDs in a season and a weak offense one, but in this hypothetical example that accounts for only a 21 point difference whereas the actual difference between the two offenses might be 200 or 300 points. Hence the long strike differential is an indication of the offenses’ relative strengths, not the cause of it. A team that can move the ball well and finish drives will very occasionally move it all the way on a single play of 50 yards or more, but that’s the result, not the cause of being able to move the ball well and accounts for only a small percentage of its points. Long strikes winning games is even more rare, even though it might not seem so when you see them a hundred times in the top ten plays of the week. And although, over the long haul, the stronger offense might win this way more often, in any given game it can easily go either way. Over a season it might be the difference between 11-5 and 10-6, or 4-12 and 5-11, in each case in either direction (or in our case between 7-9 and 8-8 in 2009).

Is a successful offense due more to a strong passing attack or a strong running game? I think in this case the answer is unequivocally a strong passing attack. From 1965 through 1969, when Gale sayers was tearing up the league, the Chicago Bears went 29-38-1. The Bears went 100-79 with Walter Payton, with virtually all of that differential coming in his last three years when they had a dominating defense (and, except for 1985, an average offense). Barry Sanders retired in frustration after a career in which the Lions went 78-82. More recently, the Vikings have gone 36-28 with Peterson, with all of that plus eight differential accounted for in their 12-4 2009 season, Brett Favre’s last hurrah. When Favre tanked in 2010 so did the Vikes, even though Peterson continued to produce at a high level. I think a less selective collection of stats would support the point even more strongly: a dominant running back cannot carry a team and teams with league-best rushing attacks are only average in the won-lost column.

I would expect a successful defense to be a mirror of a successful offense. In 2010 the Steelers led the league in fewest points allowed (232), and their rushing defense being number one in all categories contradicts my thesis but at the same time their pass defense ranked 2nd in net yards per attempt. Green Bay, who allowed only eight more points, was 3rd in net passing yards per attempt but 28th in rushing yards per carry (4.7, same as us). That similarity in yards per carry might be misleading, however, since they ranked 18th in total rushing yards allowed whereas we ranked 31st. Their high yards per carry figure may reflect a defensive philosophy in which they played soft against the run and aggressively against the pass when protecting a lead. It might be more revealing to see which teams had strong pass defenses and weak run defenses , and which had strong run defenses and weak pass defenses, and see which combination tended to give up fewer points. If a player errs in reading pass vs run I suspect it’s better to err on the side of expecting pass, because getting torched on a pass play is more likely to be fatal than giving up a big run.

It’s hard to draw conclusions from preseason games. To what extent have opposing offenses been bad and to what extent have we made them look bad? To what extent have they prioritizied scoring vs evalaution, and to what extent have we prioritized preventing scoring vs evaluation? I did think I noticed several instances in which we gave up chunks of yardage short of a first down after having put opposing offenses in difficult down and distance situations. I suspect the best offenses are those with a high passing yards per attempt and high passing totals, with rushing games in which the yardage total is relatively low but the yards per carry relatively high (i.e. being able to run when you need to). Being able to pick up third and short (or goal to go) on the ground and prevent it on defense is also key, as is being able to run while protecting a lead, but it’s hard to see how that would shake out statistically. Generally I think Miller’s and Dumervil’s ability to penetrate will help shut down passing games and be disruptive (feast or famine) against running games, with an overall positive effect (including probably interceptions and fumbles).