Ptsd is right. These games just usually turn out to be punt fests with one or two solid drives by each team being the determinant.
It can be frustrating and certainly doesn't make you feel as confident of a positive outcome as you should at the news Kupp might not play. I mean, I think it's a great thing if he's out. I'm just not confident it will hand us the advantage it should.
But... I feel like this year is different. We don't typically modify our strategy to take advantage of an opponents weakness. We line and play, and leave it up to the overall soundness of our play, individually and as a team, to win. In the years following the LOB, that was hard to do because we had pretty obvious weak links that didn't allow for the unit to function optimally. And like our adherence to philosophy when exploiting weaknesses, we also rarely did much to 'help' players who were down on ability. Again. It was line up and play. And that led to frustrating games when opponents would just beat on whatever weak link they found.
This year, that link (our interior D) has the potential to be if not a strength, something less than a liability. And that gives me hope that in a game like the one against the Rams, we can capitalize on their deficiency and with a strong offense, compound the loss of Kupp by putting them in a position where they have to throw early and often to stay in the game.
If we put teams in predictable passing downs, I think we can really get after opposing qbs with our edge, and outside- in rush.
5 days...
So right. When Pete had all the horses, and pre-rule changes, pre-rest-of-league-figuring-out-cover3-beaters, Pete's attitude was, we're just going to line up, play simple-but-fast, out-execute you, and "impose our will" on you.
IMO, way less of "we're going to dig deep to find your weak spots, find our matchup advantages, and exploit them over and over again" and "we are going to analyze our weakness our opponent might exploit, and figure out how to compensate for them, to make them less of a weakness." It's not an all-or-nothing of "impose our will" vs "find and exploit opponent weaknesses and our favorable matchups", but too often, Pete would err on the side of "impose our will on them". That, in a nutshell, is the biggest strategic difference between Pete and Bill Belichick. Belichick and his assistants analyzed opponents with a fine-tooth comb for weaknesses and matchup advantages. That's why the Patriots salivated when Jeremy Lane went down and Tharald "Toast" Simon entered the game in SB49. Over, and over, and over again, they found where Simon was, and matched up too-quick Edelman and Amendola, on him, and burned him over and over again to win the game.
In 2022, Buccaneers, Raiders, Panthers all exploited our glaring weakness of run defense, and pounded the Hawks into submission. More of a Seahawks team roster talent deficiency to run the chosen defensive scheme, or any scheme, not fixable with just scheme adjustments. Also in 2022, there was the Travis Homer TD off a fake punt against the 49ers, so that was a nice example of identifying opponent weaknesses and taking advantage of them. But that's a single-use exploit. I think Waldron is more consistent in identifying and exploiting opponent weaknesses than Pete.
Pete runs the defensive side, and with the roster upgrades, I'm hoping for fewer exploitable matchups on our D, and to see more deception, more disguised coverages, more exploitation of favorable matchups, and less "just line up and out-execute you". I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of deception on D is what, over the years, has helped make all-too-many backup QBs look like HOF candidates against Hawks D.
