the VG board football thread

The Mongoose said
I remember both plays you're talking about. The one where he ran out of bounds, meh, maybe.

But on the one where Decoud tripped him up, I don't think you can fault Reggie. He was trying to score, and to score he had to get to the outside where blockers were. Decoud made a great play.

Plus, I think when teams blitz, we are missing an opportunity. Yeah, you can keep Reggie in to protect and try to hit something downfield, as we often do. Or, you can let the rush come and get it to Reggie in the void they leave, which we also do, but just not as much.

I don't know why we don't do option 2 much anymore. It's worked in the past. Rush comes hard, ball goes to Reggie in the flats in stride. Hell, we did it last night for a 4 yard gain. An easy 4 yard gain. No team is going to continue to give you 4 yards every play.

Whatever, this is a pointless argument. It appears that Reggie's unique skill set is being purposely ignored by Payton. This might be a good thing. We've lost games in the past by trying to feature Reggie; it takes away from running a normal offense, sometimes hurts Drew's game, and limits our other weaponry.

It's unfortunate that Reggie just can't "fit in" with whatever we're doing and be dominant. But he can't. He's a winner, he can pick up blitzes, and I like having him on the team. He's not worth 11 million though.

It's a shame, because after the playoffs last year, he looked as though he had turned a corner. This preseason and early this year, he appeared to be running decisively and north-south. The injury in the 49er game set him back, I think.

Yeah, I thought he had turned the corner too, but he just hasn't done it this year. The problem with all those 4 yard passes is that you have to be perfect for 15 or so plays in order to score and that's tough to do against any NFL defense. And, when we try to do that, we get bogged down. I think teams need to get those 15 to 20 yard passes and the longer passes so that they can afford to make the occasional mistake and still keep the drive alive. And, if Reggie ever broke one of those short passes you could keep doing it and get the big play that way, but outside of the Chicago NFC Championship game, he hasn't done that. In fact, the most effective RB as far as the big play in the passing game is Pierre Thomas who has numerous 20+ yard plays and TDs off of screen passes and little dump passes. For whatever reason, Thomas has the knack to find the proper cut where as Bush always seems to cut into the defense. And that DeCoud tackle was a perfect example. It looked to me like if he cut it up he could have scored (maybe buzd can answer that since he was there), but instead he took it outside where he got nothing extra. Had he cut it up at a minimum it would have been first and goal around the five. I mean, you want Bush in the open field, but he just seems to do nothign with it and when you have guys like Graham, Pierre thomas, Meachem, Moore and Henderson who do make plays with the ball in their hands, it's hard to keep feeding it to Bush hoping he finally makes that big play.