"Aboslutely Horrendous"

- Andy Reid

First of all, let's not panic. Our defense laid a huge egg week 2 in Dallas last year, and went on to be the third best D in the league. That said, this was a frustrating performance, and now on top of that we have injury questions about Westbrook, Samuel, and Jackson as well as lingering issues for McNabb, Curtis, and I'm assuming based on his play Abiamiri. I'm worried, but I believe that the Chiefs suck enough that we should beat them and then hopefully get right durng the bye week.

This post may be a bit briefer b/c rewatching this game has been a lot less fun, but here's what I saw.


On the Saints opening drive, it became clear to me that we may have some coverage issues wiht our LBs this year. On that drive it was clear that Jordan can’t cover shockey. It also early became clear that our line could’t get pressure with Brees’s quick release which became a big part of the story of the game.

The other story was poor tackling, the likes of which it's hard to remember from an Eagles D. Issues just across the board. Everyone was missing tackles—Jordan, Gaither, Harris, Samuel, Hanson, ... it goes on. Perhaps Cole and Sheldon Brown and maybe the starting DTs can be exempted from this criticism, but everyone else on the D, including normally excellent tackler Quintin Mikell. I’m not quite as down on Samuel as most other people are, but it was not a good game for him. He played too far off of Devery Henderson on a big play, and his tackling could definitely be better, but I still think we’ve seen much worse from the corners who’ve worn green and silver (Bobby Taylor anyone)—when no one else tackled either I think it actually magnified Samuel’s flaws. Abiamiri looked bad on multiple plays. I don’t know if some of this is his injury, but I’m still real concerned about that LDE spot and our apparent inability to generate much of a pass rush without blitzing, and this week Abiamiri also struggle in run defense, which is supposed to be his strong suit.

I saw one great play from Trevor Laws, muscling through a double team early in the first half (I mean literally just being stronger on that particular play than both the fat guys blocking him combined) to force Brees back into Trent Cole’s bone-crushing sack. It will be interesting to see what we get from Laws going forward.

Kolb was better than I anticipated, but that’s not saying much since I kind of expected old man river Garcia to be playing by the end of the game. The TD to Jackson was a beauty and he made a couple nice intermediate throws, especially to his road roommate Brent Celek--maybe they read the playbook together for bedtime stories. Kolb rushed some throws when the pressure wasn’t there, perhaps b/c his reads were oversimplified. Most egregiously, this happened on Kolb’s backbreaking INT early in the 3rd quarter. Kolb zeroed in on the out route on that play even though the slot receiver (I think it was either Celek or Alex Smith) was much more open because Saints LB Scott Shanle had already committed himself to jumping DeSean Jackson’s outside route. Kolb also seemed to struggle throwing the ball on the run, including not only numerous incompletions but also on the nasty bailout catch by Jason Avant in the end zone. Kolb did a good job of not taking sacks, but he has a lot to work on before he can be called a legitimate NFL starter, not least being his accuracy while running from pressure. I also wonder a bit about his arm strength on some of his sideline throws. Whether he continues to develop remains to be seen, but right now he’s looking to me like a very serviceable backup, but not the answer for the future—but of course, the jury is still out and will be for awhile.

As to the wildcat, I’m basically cool with it (although I’m a bit uncomfortable with the formation where the tackles were split out wide—a play that should have been a disaster without D-Jax being a superfreak … superfreak, he’s superfreaky!). In general though it put the ball in the hands of Westbrook and Jackson and they picked up some nice yardage, so I have no problem with it, and it will get a bit more interesting once Vick is back there—for example maybe he throws Weaver a bit more catchable ball than Westbrook does in the red zone late in the 3rd—so that maybe teams can’t commit to a Vick run as much later on. I would, however, have liked us run to the ball not in the wildcat, with Weaver blocking, a bit more. The Saints’ run defense was excellent last week against Detroit but it was pitiful for most of last year, so I would have hoped to try to establish the power run a bit and let our big boys get out there and bang on their linebackers to try to wear them down (and believe me it was HOT in the sun on Sunday, just ask Eagellectual readers Meredith the consultant and Alison the teacher, the first person I've ever sat with whi ran to buy ice cream during a time out).

Special teams sucked—too many penalties, two devastatingly lousy punts by Rocca, one of which only happened b/c of an illegal shit punishment shift penalty (Freudian slip), and poor ball security by Ellis Hobbs—a veteran like him should realize that after bouncing around traffic, someone will be coming up from behind, and I didn’t like the way he was holding his ball on the last kick return of the first half either.

I thought the protection Kolb got was pretty excellent. I’m starting to feel good about the Winston Justice Experiment Part Deux (a.k.a. playing his natural position on the right side).