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Originally Posted by GTripp0012
Alright, I understand. Nothing I'm doing is arbitrary, it's all quite straightforward, but you don't see it the same way. Gotcha.
See the problem with Philly vs. Washington determining who has the better defense is that: 1) if there's only two teams in the entire population, nothing can tell the difference between bad offense and good defense. You saying that our defense clearly outplayed their's might just be their offense getting clearly outplayed by ours, and 2) there's 14 games that you're just totally ignoring. Not arbitrarily, but as I said before, you aren't actually backing what you think you are backing. Because no one agrees with you that the other 14 games shouldn't be counted.
The Redskins were top ten in most stats, and are probably were a top ten defense when you get right down to it. But what if I say, and defend, them being the 12th best defense? There's nothing arbitrary about that, it's just a ranking based on evidence. Furthermore, there was such a huge, undeniable gap between us and the five "elite" defenses last year, that when you start to establish an NFL average defense from the 2008 season, it comes out somewhere around the 10th or 11th best team. Just because of the obscene quality of the defenses at the top of the list (obviously, the best in years). Again, nothing remotely arbitrary about that, just standard normal distribution.
I think you have no idea how good Minnesota and Philadelphia's defenses were last year, and any argument that suggests we were better than them last year is going to be arbitrary and circumstantial, because there was such a huge chasm between the two. I guess that's just my opinion there, but it just not a strong argument to say that they were in the top five last year defensively. Let's face it, if we had a top five defense, we would have made the playoffs. Every one of my top five defenses did make it, and none of them had any more offense to note than we did.
Again, I think you can debate if they're 6th or 11th or whatever. You can say, "we have a better defense the Giants", and I can respond "even though they create turnovers and we do not?" and you can say "yes" and that's that. I would just question who the one picking the arbitrary numbers is right now.
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You originally said the Eagles have an undeniably better defense than us. I don't understand how you can say that. Maybe you really are sure in your mind of that, but I'm not sold on that at all. I think it would be much easier to say the Eagles offense is better than the Redskins offense and our special teams was nothing special. And if that's the case then how did we beat them twice? From the games that I watched I remember our defense outplaying them.
And in terms of turnovers you're only looking at the one side of it. The Redskins were the ONLY team in the NFL last year to never give up more than 27 points in a game. That's consistency and that may not be flashy and get media attention about the defense on NFL Live or Sportscenter or have guys like Dawkins acting like an animal or the fat Williams guys getting in trouble with water pills and Jared Allen doing vitamin water commercials or any Pro Bowlers, but I think if people actually watched the games and paid attention to the defense they would see it differently. Also people don't look at the turnovers in terms of we were always in close games last year so teams didn't have to take any risks against us. When your offense can get you a lead (28th in points) other teams have to take more chances in order to catch up, which causes more turnovers.
I think our offense was really bad and we got unlucky losing some close games. Also, just because you're a top 5 defense it doesn't mean you automatically make the playoffs. I could argue we were the 4th best defense so I just don't see how you can be so sure those other 5 were better than us.
But all I was really saying is there's a lot more of what goes into how good a defense is than just the stats you're using. You gotta think about what offenses they play, what their offense does (if they keep putting the defense in bad positions), and a whole lot of other stuff that you can't just average with stats. Just because a team is 10th in interceptions, 10th in yards, 10th in yards allowed per drive, etc, it doesn't mean they're the 10th best defense. There are a lot of important factors not related to the team defensive statistics. I think it's more of an opinion than a statistical analysis.