Thanks, SW and Yasoon. I appreciate the words.

I too got a little caught up in the thing as well, even going as far as throwing a bad stat out there, the 2000 Ravens' points allowed, and I never ever throw averages/ stats as proof of anything. The one thing I can tell you that stat was an honest mistake, which I acknowledged after Wheelman pointed out my mistake..


Lemme go on a tangent, before I get the "you used stats on your original post"; I didn't. There is a huge difference between saying "they are giving 28.9 points per game" and saying "they went 0-11 on 3rd down conversions". The former is a stat, the latter is the actual result of a game. If anyone wants an explanation, I'll be glad to explain...

...but I digress :)

Again, thanks guys for the words. I love defense, and I've been down the past 3-4 years because of the play of the defense... as bad as the whole thing is, I am actually a little excited about signs of live by the D.

OK, I won't point fingers at a single individual...But everyone knows this teams defense bites the stinky dogs butt.

Every team we've played this year with the exception of the opening Carolina game, we've caught them severly at their worse, Giants and Vikings, Greenbay, Pat's now the Jets. I'm talking about playing these teams 3rd and 4th string offenses with our starting defense; and our defense can't stop a leaky faucet.

Talk about our offense year round 12 times on sunday, until you can stop a opponent(which we haven't been able to do since Haslett got here) you can't be a good football team...Everything is second priority to the defense, everything!

I also don't think the defense is as bad as most people think either. T-R makes some very good points. Sure it's easy to look at the overall defensive ranking and say we stink (even though we're in the middle of the pack), but you have to look at the other stat colums too.

We're last in turnover differential at -13 (28 total TO's) If you keep giving the ball to the opponents offense, they're probably gonna outscore you. We turned the ball over on the opening kickoff in weeks 2 and 3, giving the opponent a very short field, then followed that with a punt on the next posession in both games. Then against the Packers in week 4, AB threw an INT for a TD on the 3rd posession, followed by another INT in Saints territory on the 4th posession. The best defense is a good offense.

I disagree that the D is really any better than in the past couple of years. The difference now is that the offense is not putting up the kind of numbers that they had in the past. Thus, opposing teams aren't needing to score as much resulting in better D stats. The thing is...in close games against even moderately good offenses, the defense is not reliably capable of preventing a score. In most games I feel very confident that when the other team needs a score they can get it. Problem this year is our offense hasn't given opposing D's much need to score.