Defensively, I credit or blame Dom for one thing, the center of the field always being open for crossing routes. Other than that I lay the most blame on the guys up front. You guys are grown ass men, you shouldn't need a coach to get you fired up for a game, you should have the pride to do that yourself. The coach should teach you the gameplan. Once you are put in position, it is up to you to beat the man across from you who is also getting paid a lot to stop you. The one who wants it more usually wins that battle. The secondary, with Shields out is young and you are going to expect mistakes as they learn. If we Remember Nick Collins, Tramon, Sam, none of them became the players they were in their 1st and 2nd years either. I remember thinking before Nick's 3rd season the talk being at that time that one either he or Aaron Rouse need to setup at safety. Fortunately Nick did. With the youth on the backend, this year for the defense was dependent on getting pressure up front and in our bad games, that hasn't happened and we paid the price defensively.
Offensively, I lay this almost all on coaching mostly playcalling and scheme, but I'm not strictly blaming clements because this has been ongoing for a number of years. When we face physical defenses the offense struggles. Now the problems I see no commitment to a dominating run game. most of the runs are options where Rodgers can hand off or pass, but the oline doesn't know which so they can't simply drive the defense backwards, which means we end up run blocking on our side of the LOS. If we concentrated and ran more simple designed runs, we would have more plays where the RBs are at theLOS or + yards before being contacted rather than -2 or -3 yards.
Passing, Aikman said late in the game, nobody is getting open over the middle. Well I paid attention the entire 2nd half and the reason nobody was getting open is because we ran almost no routes across the middle less than 10 yards downfield. So LBers and S don't have to worry about the anything in front of them except a rare middle check down so they drop 10-15 yards deep. That is a lot of playing field we don't even threaten and area other teams kill our defense on. CBs don't have to worry about covering a short In route so their jobs is easier and with no deep threat we end up facing 6 or so defenders between 10-20 yards deep. If the play calling doesn't start putting passing pressure on all parts of the field, its going to be a long season
Pass blocking, has been terrible and much of that is for the same reason we don't have a run game. Defenses can pretty much act like it is 4th qtr with a 50pt lead and just pass rush and push everything to the middle, which will clog up our delayed runs and put pressure on Rodgers either way. and with few quick hit passing routes they will just keep coming. This is where screens come in, the two we ran worked because they were going balls out on the pass rush. Even if a screen doesn't make a big gain, it slows the rush which helps the Oline in blocking and time for routes to develop. The other thing is slants and short crosses. Back when we had the "deepest WR Corp" Any one of those WR could run any route on any given play so dbs had to protect against anything anytime it would be Jones on a slant on the right, next driver on a short dig route with Jennings on an out an up on top of it. we usually had 3 of 5 WR on some route short of 10 yards with only one or two going deep. Today, we are lucky to have anything but a checkdown short.
The world needs ditch diggers too Danny!!!