What was encouraging on Defense?

Submitted by pdxwolve on

Yes, our defense sucks, but I was encouraged by a few things.

1. William Campbell making some plays.
2. J.B. Fitz coming in and getting some playing time.
3. Increased time for Brandon Smith
4. Donovan Warren (is it just a foregone conclusion he's turning pro?)
5. Craig Roh growing into a leader
6. Mike Martin is our third-best defensive player.
7. Teric making a few plays.

With the exception of Warren, these are freshmen and sophomores making plays for our team. It is the upperclassmen (OBVIOUSLY NOT INCLUDING BG) that have let us down. And while BG and DW are NFLers, it seems we don't have leaders on that team to settle the rest of the players down, and that the losing mentality on defense has been pervasive even before RR took the reigns.

All of our young recruits will not pan out, but these guys are all contributing at different levels. Our experienced defense flat-out blew last year, and we've improved just slightly. It seems our best hope is to get some more PT for our young kids over the next few days, then say goodbye to high-star, low-talent holdovers from the Carr Regime.

bdubya

November 7th, 2009 at 4:49 PM ^

What was Teric Jones doing? I saw a few people mention him, but I didn't see what happened. Also, at this point I'm with many other people when I say that we should put in a lot of the young backups. Putting in Fitzgerald will help his development, and we didn't see much of a drop-off. Put in Vlad and see what happens. Williams didn't do anything today that showed that he should have a lock on the position.

ppudge

November 7th, 2009 at 5:00 PM ^

It seemed like Fitzgerald was in on a few plays today. I guess that was encouraging. But perhaps, after the midweek UFR, we'll find out he was responsible for some big plays against (though my money is on Williams and Kovacs getting toasted on the UFR).

tdumich

November 7th, 2009 at 5:04 PM ^

i have no clue why we put obi and mouton in there. at least get the young guys some playing time. from what we heard last week leach graded out the highest out of all our lb's. fitz was playing decent outside of that missed tackle on the td run.