Smoot Lays The Smack Down (Redskins vs. Colts)

[NLC1054]

Originally Posted by Lotus

You do not seem to grasp the concept of keeping a defense honest. If you want to run and throw short passes on long drives, as you stated above, you have to keep the safeties from creeping up. This is why everyone in the league takes strategic shots occasionally. Not all the time, just occasionally. And our average of one a game (at best) is not really "occasionally."

Your notion that it is IMPOSSIBLE to complete a deep ball on cover 2 is also problematic. It's difficult but not impossible, as evidenced by the fact that someone does it every week.

You seem to be bringing black-and-white thinking to a shades-of-grey topic.

I'm not saying you're wrong about safeties creeping up. Nor am I saying it's impossible to throw deep on a cover 2 defense.

I'm saying the Colts never dropped a safety into the box the entire game. I'm saying, in this one particular game, of which John Beck is taking criticism for, in which he was instructed by his offensive coordinator to take what the defense gave him, this particular defense dropped seven guys into coverage on nearly every down.

As I said before, their safeties were so deep, they were rarely on the screen. Keeping the defense honest, in this case, in this one particular case, was a moot point, because the safeties were never in the box, and were essentially being "kept honest" the entire game.

When they did bring a safety on a blitz, Beck picked it up and hit Santana Moss on a cross route that went for the first down. They only dropped that safety into the box when the Redskins were on their 20 in the red zone.

The rest of the time, despite the short passes and the running game, the Colts never put a safety in the box. You can't "keep a defense honest" when they've already shown that they have no intention of letting you get deep on them, short passes and run game be damned.

I fully expect the gameplan to be different versus the Ravens. I'm just stating that I don't think it's fair to criticize John for not "taking a shot" to keep a defense honest that was already paying things pretty honest.