Davidson Deac II

We have made mistakes on offense to. The stupid holding call on Thomas negated a big run.

Both offenses look like crap so far. The Browns can run the ball, and we knew that. But you can't win in today's NFL if you can't throw it on occasion. Of course, we can't do either. But if we can survive the first half, we might settle down in the second.

We played the second and fourth down plays really well. The third down play, the Browns blew it.

D played well on the second and fourth down there. Not so much on the 1st and third, but we stopped em.

Hekker is probably our best free agent signing.

Well, I could have read that one. Third down, need something quick. Oh well, lets see what the d can do.

Cleveland fans will likely find out next year. If he can take a talented qb with a lot of issues who hasn't played in two years and turn the team into a winner, he is a great coach. If not, someone will be asking how good of an assistant coach he will be.

Sun is out, I do wonder how fast this synthetic crap dries?

They had an adequate run game last year. Not great, but good enough to take a little pressure off. Tonight, they look very bad. Meh, its early though. Lots of football left this year.

Wake Forest guy with the pick. Carlos Boogie Basham having a good night with a sack and a INT.

They talk about Kupp missing Beckham, but I think they miss a running game more. They also probably aren't happy about Stafford throwing the ball to the other team.

Well, this is becoming a blowout.

Wow, that is bad. It's as bad as when the best run defense in the league (the Aint's) got abused by Sanders and Howard of the Eagles and gave up 160 plus yards to those two on only 26 carries. And allowed 40 points, with the help of a couple of turnovers by the offense (sounds familiar).

Certainly, some truth to that. But I would venture that most teams struggled against those types of offenses. I don't think we had a great defense; I just don't think it was as bad as some do.

I agree, one man certainly won't cause that much of an impact. That being said, I think we look at our run defense thru a prism, especially us older guys. We look at the way we think it should look instead of how it looks compared to the rest of the NFL. Reality is that there aren't that many great run defenses that can stop team's week in and week out. Because most defenses are designed to stop the pass. If you compare us to run defenses from the 80's, we weren't good. If you compare us to the rest of the NFL last year, we were probably overall middle of the pack. Not great, not bad. The Saints had the best run defense in the league last year, and they still got abused in several games. The aforementioned Eagles ran all over them, averaging over 6 ypc with about 200 yards.

It hurts passing game more, but it hurts both. The defense has to adjust to cover a banged up secondary, which hurts other parts of the defense.

They had one long drive, the rest of their scores came after turnovers. The winning drive was a 26-yard drive that occurred after a blocked punt. Hurts had one run of 14 yards. And even when adding that one long run in, he averaged 3 ypc in that game. The defense shut down the Eagles running game. But no matter how well the defense plays, if the offense and special teams force it to constantly play with its back against the wall, the 85 bears would struggle. Of course, the defense certainly crapped out against other teams. The Vikings game was terrible. And by the end of the season, both the offense and defense had pretty much given up.

Our poorest performances irt run defense were generally against teams balanced teams, teams that can beat you with the run or pass. For example, Dallas abused us in the run game, while we shut down the Eagles run game, even though statistically last year, the Eagles were a better running team than the Cowgals. Of course, we still lost to the Eagles due to three picks from our offense. Fortunately, Cleveland may be one dimensional.

I would bet that a lot of head coaching hires get fired after 3-4 years. The NFL has a very high turnover/failure rate. For every Bill B or Sean Payton, there are 3 or 4 Matt Rhules or Bobby Petrino's, or George Seifert's.

Virtually every coach that gets hired in the NFL eventually gets fired, and the owners rarely admit they made a mistake.

Perhaps, but an awful human being.

I think Viserys is a good king, which in Westeros means being supplanted by a bad/vicious king. But it was a good episode.

Don't know if it was his first, but it was definitely his last for the Panthers. fwiw, the stretch from 1997 to 2000 was perhaps the worst stretch of drafts our history. Minter and Rucker were decent to good, Hayes was decent for a year or two, no one else worth mentioning in that entire four-year stretch. And of course, in 97 we drafted he whose name shall not be mentioned.

1998

I have my doubts, but we could be better this year.