"We need to tackle the damn ball carrier and put him on the ground," he said. "That's what we'll be focused on."

McCarthy and his staff have the bye week to figure out if they can salvage their run defense, which has not ranked higher than 30th at any point during in the first half of the season and slipped back to 32nd (last) after Sunday's 44-23 loss.

"The run defense was our Achilles' heel clearly on defense," McCarthy said. "Too many missed tackles."

Rob Demovsky  wrote:

Isn't this a bit hypocritical?

The whole premise of this new defensive "innovation" is that the running game "doesn't matter." The "smaller, quicker" Dline should bait teams into running more, which means they will lose, because "Today's NFL" is all about passing and making big plays in the passing game.

What matters is "opposing QB rating," not stuffing the run, right? If you want to experiment with this defense then do that, don't waver halfway through. He's losing confidence in his own line of bullshit.

Originally Posted by: nerdmann 

"I’ve seen us through the first half of the season play pretty good run defense, so I feel like we can," defensive coordinator Dom Capers insisted Monday.

I've re watched most of the Saints possessions and if I were to pick THE problem for the run defense I wouldn't pick the defensive line. You guys can crap on those guys all you want but Daniels was about the only player on the whole defense making plays and while Guion had a few where he got pushed around like he usually does he held his ground most of the time. All of our starting LBs besides Clay Matthews just got their butts kicked against the run (Clay still had a few bad looking plays though), especially Peppers and Hawk. Throw in nobody from the secondary being able to tackle at all and you really cannot put this one on the d-line. I guess it's just too easy to blame the line but they looked to me like the strongest group of the defense.

Originally Posted by: steveishere 

The other thing I have an issue with is- isn't tackling something that is a point of emphasis on the first day of TC? Why are they just now talking about it? Isn't tackling a point of emphasis from the first day of whatever peewee football program they played in? Isn't tackling a point of emphasis in high school and college? How can grown men who are paid handsomely who have been playing the damn game for 10 years now suddenly asked to make tackling a point of emphasis? I would want to fire a HC and DC on the spot if they said this after 8 weeks of a season just as a matter of principle.

Is is not that hard. When you see a player make a poor tackle in practice (The practices that allow a player to tackle) pull him aside and chew him out. When you see a player make a poor tackle in preseason bench him. When you see a player make a poor tackle in the first 7 games DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT THEN.

Originally Posted by: wpr