HarveysWBs

Thanks for letting us keep a TO, what a gift.

Not like he had bad coverage. Stroud finally escaped pressure and made a great throw. It happens. No matter what happens now, defense did all you can ask.

Yeah, just let them through. A TD or first down on this play is survivable. Can’t bleed clock.

This one is going to be on Jordan, with Nixon a special mention in the post mortem.

If the penalty is for block in the back, and one never makes contact with a player’s back, then I don’t care how fast a guy is running. You can’t penalize a guy for running fast and making a ref’s job difficult. They’re paid to get it right.

Not a great call. Thanks zebes

I don’t mind the defense jawing a bit at all. They are doing their job today. Best phase so far, and it’s not terribly close. Love the energy.

*sigh* long TD drive would have about done it. Time for another gut check quarter I guess.

I hate that audible. Too much team speed from this defense to go wide on short yardage. C’mon guys.

Once again, demonstrating that we remain the youngest team in football. Time to grow up.

The horror, the horror…

He has one. 500 rushing yards and one rushing TD. Pretty wild.

Lot of credit to Ryans and the Houston front seven containing the run with a lot of backups in the game. You have to think part of the game plan today was that we expected to be having a little more success on the ground.

That’s step one. Nice job pass rush.

Going to have to get a stop out of the break. I don’t want to see what Love looks like today trying to go one-dimensional.

Man I like Evan Williams. Let’s go, kid.

We use a timeout now with the clock not running? Hope we stop this two point try now…

I know Rodgers never throwing picks has kind of spoiled the franchise, but Love probably doesn’t need to throw picks at quite this rate. Get it together, dude.

I’m loving what we’re getting from Gary today. That’s a huge plus.

Too many mistakes today. Glad we’ve got the lead, but man this game feels like it should be 21-7 against.

I understand having it up to here with Narveson, but I hope it doesn’t come to this. McManus isn’t even that good, though he kicked outside in Colorado, which is a mark in his favor for our purposes. I think we should meet anyone’s draft pick asking price for a reliable NFL-level kicker in a trade. I’d rather Gute hound the woebegone franchises as long as it takes to get somebody to do a deal than mess with McManus.

I’ve made no secret of my wishes to get Kim on the Brewers roster for several years now. Where it did not work before, now with the shoulder thing, he seems exactly the type of player we’d target in the offseason, too: good not great player, needs to rebuild some value after an injury. I’m sure it will work out even better for the Crew than it did with Winker and Hoskins. Third time is the charm…

There was some discussion in the NFL thread about our defense when the Saleh stuff came up in conversation, so I thought I’d move over here with my thoughts. I don’t know what Hafley’s defense is going to be (I think 8 or 9 games is when I want to see this thing clicking a bit more than it has, and that would be right about when the offense turned it around last year), but it seems to be a perfect marriage of plan and player when it comes to McKinney, who probably needs no more discussion at this point. He’s doing things we haven’t seen around here since Woodson, and unlike for some people on the defense, Hafley’s scheme and McKinney’s game seems very sympatico. This brings me to one of the other infusions of talent from the offseason, Evan Williams. When you watch that film breakdown, you can see the proof of his studying and the intelligence coming together. Not only does he anticipate and make good plays, he learns from mistakes and reads tendencies to make in-game adjustments, too. Coaches raved about him in the pre-draft process, and I can see why. As kind of a small player with 4.6 speed, who knows how long he’ll have starting ability, but he might have it already, and he seems to play fast enough to be able to keep adequate legs into a second contract. He looks like a really nice find for Gutekunst and the scouting department. All this good news and feel-good talk about the safeties actually brings me to my biggest fear for this season. Apart from the injuries (which can tank anyone’s season at any time), the thing I worry about most is that this defense will never quite come together this year because we don’t have the personnel it needs up front. I think Gutekunst has mostly proven he can identify players a system needs and go get those guys in free agency and the draft. That’s all well and good for the safety overhaul this year, which has clearly worked. But the defensive front is almost all holdovers from previous years and a different scheme. Now I’m not going to exonerate the players entirely; while I’m not a film rat or anything, it seems entirely fair to say that Clark, Gary, and Smith (and probably LVN) need to deliver the goods and they’re good enough to do it in any scheme. Jon Meerdink writes for APC and has a great podcast and site of his own, and he’s been compiling pass rush stats for year over year comparison. This year, it is a grim read. It is getting to the point where you have to think if it doesn’t turn around soon, it might not happen at all, and that will not bode well down the stretch. There’s still time for this pass rush, but the signs of life are very few, and it is getting late.

My first thought is that this is a very NY Jets kind of move. My second thought is (like @BrewerFan), I wish they would have just pulled the plug before we hired Hafley, and not just because he could have been an upgrade at DC for us. Hafley may turn out to be great (small sample size, but the vastly improved safety play plus the entire defensive front taking a huge step back seems to be about a wash so far, which isn’t great), but I really hate the idea that Saleh could land with an NFC contender, and you have to imagine Shanahan has already put some feelers out about him coming on in some capacity to help fix their relatively porous defense so far. What I want to see is Belichick coming in and you having a grumpy old drill sergeant on the sidelines with a grumpy old hippie leading the offense. That’s good television right there.

It was such a winnable game for the Jets, too. Darnold looked like the second-half version of himself from last week, Jones had the first of his several inevitable injuries. Rodgers just has to be decent and they pull that out. This is why he had to go, these were the games he started to lose in Green Bay by the end that were almost inexplicable. I still think he can be a successful QB in this league for another year or two, but he’s not Superman. The cast means more to him than ever, and he’s got to be on his game more than ever. The days of getting his B- effort and still making it look easy are long gone. Time comes for us all.