Week 7 AMA: Where do we go from here?
I can understand losing. But what I don't understand how almost every individual talents are struggling. Chase Young supposed to be dominating. Breese supposed to take that next leap. Every defensive players seems to lose their ability to tackle all of a sudden. What is going on here? Who's is to blame for this?
It's a combination.
I'll start by saying that any player who's made it to the NFL should be tackling better than these guys currently are. So now that that's out of the way let's take a look at some of the specifics, b/c there are multitude of tackling situations that a defender encounters during a game (and the Saints are doing pretty poorly at all).
The first issue is the Saints are thin on both sides of the ball. Paper thin. And a lot of their "force multiplier" players are injured--the guys who up the level of their respective unit through their presence play. On defense that starts with Pete Werner, who is the best tackler on the team. That not only means that there's drop off at his position, but now you're missing that guy in the front 7 who makes up for a lot of other player's mistakes or at least decreases the demand placed on them. I think the Will Harris injury has also been significant, and as I've discussed before, Demario Davis is either not 100% or his age is really starting to show.
The defensive line is playing very poorly against the run, and that also makes tackling difficult because
fits aren't as clean as they should be. Again, I think there's really an absence of a force multiplier in a unit that has been slowly depleted over recent years, where key players were lost to free agency and the Saints have been unable to adequately replace them. Cam Jordan is getting up there in age and is not as disruptive. Bresee is still a little one dimensional. Chase Young just hasn't found a rhythm and Peyton Turner cannot stay healthy.
All that said--this is still a team that should be playing far above its current level. We've seen banged up Saints defenses before, under DA, playing better with a handful of rookie UDFAs at key positions than what we're seeing now. And this goes back to an issue I've had since day 1--what seems to be a massive philosophical shift on the defensive side of the ball, which seems to be far less pressure-oriented (aside from early down run blitzes) and content to just play loose and lax until the red zone. When your offense is putting up points you can get away with this a little more, and the defense ends up looking pretty good playing from a lead and maximizing turnover opportunities.
But when the offense is banged up and isn't putting up points and sustaining drives, this is the worst situation to be in as this type of defense. It leads to sustained drives and fatigue and lapses in assignment discipline. How many times have we seen a 3 & 9 where a QB takes a checkdown that results in an open-field one-on-one with little pursuit coming, and a missed tackled leads to a first down. It's as infuriating as it is baffling.
And within all this there just seems to not be a lot of clarity when it comes to assignments and responsibilities. I can typically watch a play one or two times through and tell you exactly what the defensive structure was and what the assignments were within it. But this season I've had to spin it a couple more times b/c there are so many assignment errors. The Eagles and Chiefs games specifically come to mind b/c of how good they were at formationing the Saints' defense. But again, this is the NFL. You've seen tight bunch, mesh concepts, rub concepts, delayed crossers, etc.--and yet time and time again,
I'm seeing seasoned veterans WILDLY out of position.
The problems on the defensive side fo the ball are broad and deep. And compared to the offense, far less easy to diagnose at a core level. Age, philosophy, heath, clarity, accountability, the lack of complementary play from the offense--there's so much going on that I don't know which is actually a cause and which is an effect.
Regardless--it's on the coaches, not us, to find the answer to these questions.