I guess it depends on what McVay thinks is the reason the defense went from very good to averaging giving up about 30 pts a game. Twice to 5’10” Bryce F’ing Young.
Maybe the personnel is just bad. But maybe teams figured Shula out. I dunno
It’s the secondary, pure and simple. They started out with veterans at CB + Durant, and the veterans (plus Lake) got injured and exposed. Witherspoon went out in week 2, and when he came back in week 12, he wasn’t the same. Forbes played well for a while and peaked against Tampa and then declined. Darious Williams missed 5 games, and didn’t always hold up when he came back. Durant also peaked against Tampa, and then wasn’t as effective, though he never hit bottom the way Witherspoon and Forbes did. Durant plus Wms, which were the CBs in the final games + post-season, = 5’11 + 5’9 respectively.
They also missed Lake and had no replacement.
Against Tampa it looked like the defense was fine. Then it got exposed.
To be fair, against Carolina in the regular season they had 3 injury replacements on the OL. As we know that always leads to disaster. Granted McClendon was playing well, but he was still a replacement, and with OL replacements you lose a bit of cohesion and communication. When you add the LOT plus your best lineman (ROG) it gets to be a problem, and it was in that game.
Back to defense. I’m sorry to say Landman dropped off too. Before the Carolina game he was averaging 9 tackles a game. After Tampa he averaged 5.5 a game.
I think for the defense as a whole, there was a lot of reading their own press.
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