WillMacKenzie

It has been my belief for quite some time that we need to utilize the preseason for what it is: evaluation and PRACTICE.

What I’m rambling about before coffee this morning is this:

Take what you see seriously. Don’t trot your second team out if your first team looks like crap for a series.

We’ve all tried to comfort ourselves in the junk food of excuses at some point, cause we’d rather not face the truth.

“Oh we looked bad because there’s no SCHEMING”

“Oh it’s just preseason, they’re vanilla.”

“Oh it doesn’t even matter, we’ll magically flip a switch and work it out when it matters”

Wrong. If other teams can play D without scheming, we need to be able to as well. We flat out don’t have the talent for it, especially in our LB core (starting Robertson would help).

This shows up plainly when you need to make adjustments to your (wrong) scheme, as Allen had, but your players can’t adjust because they’re scheme dependent.

Payton can make this work because 1. NFL has slanted towards offense. 2. Offense is run by Drew Brees, and is loaded with real talent up front. 3. Payton is legendary at mismatches. Allen is clearly not.

Payton needs to recognize that scheming can backfire, maybe not too often with good coaches, but they’re indiscriminate — this one happened to backfire with a divisional foe.

That can’t happen. If we want to be taken seriously, we need to get serious about building a real defense.

Brees is a high character guy and would never throw anyone under the bus, but it’s criminal to keep throwing our hall of famer under a bus.

neugey

The NFL's inconvenient truth - the preseason doesn't do what it is supposed to do. It doesn't do jack for getting veteran starters ready for the season. Teams are too afraid of getting their marquee guys hurt in meaningless games. It's just a 4-week period to try out fringe players and get younger players some reps. But even that is an exercise in stupidity because there is no roster space for virtually all of the prospects and longshots. Basically teams spend 4 weeks looking for all the depth that they ultimately aren't allowed to have. It's comical.

ChrisXVI

Good post Will! You certainly may be on to something here.

K Major

I didn't see any 2nd half adjustments. LB's out of position in preseason, carried over into the regular season. Safety play was non existent, corners had their lunch money stolen. Vonn was lost and confused on the long bomb/TD. Those guys on defense were absolutely clueless in a real NFL game. Pre season is over.

That's all coaching and scheme. I saw guys poorly prepared by our staff.

All eyes on you Dennis Allen. Fix it.