mondry wrote:Bingo, asking the defense to stop a lions offense with calvin johnson, reggie bush, etc more times than necessary because your offense is struggling AND turning the ball over is really asking a lot.
In today's nfl I don't see many defenses just shutting down one of the upper tier quality offenses for 4 quarters. Especially since we run a bend but don't break. It bent just fine and held the lions to 6 points near half time but Ponder turned the ball over and gave them another opportunity. Sure they could have came up with a stop, got themselves off the field, but we don't have the 2000 ravens defense so I don't expect that out of them routinely. It's also 2013 and everything favors the offense!
It's pretty well understood that the key to most vikings wins are 1. the turnover battle, and 2. keeping X big name QB off the field by sustaining drives and winning time of possession. Well the offense failed miserably at BOTH of those key factors. Stafford and the lions are probably now in that company of "we have to keep rodgers / manning / brady / stafford off the field with our OFFENSE." They're simply too good to give extra chances too.
I don't think you can blame the defense because at this point we KNOW they're not very good, with HUGE holes at LB and question marks at CB / S. It's up to the offense to make their lives as easy as possible by getting a lead and letting our real strength, our pass rushers get after the QB.
Wait a minute... we can't blame the defense because we know they're not very good? We also know the passing game and pass protection are problem areas and, in fact, complaints about that aspect of the team are easily the most frequently raised issues when it comes to the Vikings. Why should the offense and defense be held to different standards?
The Vikings are a team. I see no reason to give to give any unit a pass. The defense has a job to do, just like the offense.
John pointed out Detroit's 3rd and 4th down conversion percentage and then wrote: " If I was just looking at those stats, I would say that the Lions were stopped fairly frequently by the defense, and would start to look at # of possessions to try to figure out why the yardage was so high."
My question is why would you stop there? You don't even have to look at # of possessions to get an idea of why the Lions gained so many yards. They had 28 first downs in the game. If they had 13 3rd down attempts and only converted 5 of them, that tells me they picked up a LOT of first downs without ever getting to 3rd down and that speaks volumes about the way the defense played. They picked up 8 first downs and consumed about 10 minutes on their first two drives alone. Unless we're going to hold the offense responsible for letting the defense get tired because AD scored on the Vikings one offensive play between those two possessions, that's ALL on the defense. If they were worn out, maybe their own inability get off the field in the first quarter had something to do with it. I'll grant that being bad is a legitimate excuse for playing badly but if that's the case, the Vikings offense deserves the same "Get Out of Jail Free" card.
There's no reason to let the Vikes defense off the hook for that performance.
