@mudfly said:

seem to indicate?.......doesn't even look close to me....

What can I say? I opted for "understatement." Just thought I'd give that approach a try...

@mudfly said:

When I'm referencing our LB'ers I'm not including the OLB'ers in any of the stats. So of those 21 sacks, take away Kruger, Sheard and Mingo from those 21 and what do you have? 5. Not exactly the sack express. As for the TFL's...i'll fully admit I'm surprised that Dansby had 8. I'd really like to see when those happened. But even 8 TFL's, while very respectable...isn't putting him in an elite category especially when compared with his overall tackle numbers. Go look at rookie Chris Borlands numbers....11 TFL's and nearly double the solo tackles. And this dude didn't start till late October. In 7.5 games, cause he got hurt in the last game against Seattle...he very nearly doubled our star FA ILB'er. In 7.5 games.....Dansby missed 4 games I believe so he started in 12. That has to say something to you. The 9'ers defense was as depleted throughout he season as anybody's. With the exception of Justin Smith they had a revolving D line too. 47 solo tackles but it's the D line's fault? Some 3rd round rookie nearly doubled that output with similar injuries to his defense and in almost 5 less games. Can we please be serious? Our ILB'ers are a problem. I have zero confidence that they're numbers would have looked much better behind the Ravens D line or the Patriots or whoever.....the D line was not responsible "that" low of an output. No way. He had 8TFL's...great, that means when he did manage to make get through he made it count. Problem is he didnt' get to the ball carrier much did he? Robertson had 10 more solo tackles than Dansby and how many games did he start?

@tour2ma said:

seem to indicate?.......doesn't even look close to me....

some other interesting and objective stats....

Browns D line had 8 tfl and 7 sacks

Browns Lb's had 30 tfl and 21 sacks.........Dansby had 8 tfl, plus his sacks(and a game winner against NO too)....meaning, even with missing games, he had more tackles for loss than the entire D line did.....yet, maybe he's the problem?.....make sense?...

@clevfan4life said:

calling Dansby one of the best ILB's in the league? Did they watch any of our games? He looked lost in the tall weeds most of the 1st half of the season.

They who? PFF doesn't "watch".

Point was the PFF ratings, objective ratings, that would seem to indicate that the D-line was the source of more woes than the LB crew.

@clevfan4life said:

calling Dansby one of the best ILB's in the league? Did they watch any of our games? He looked lost in the tall weeds most of the 1st half of the season.

Seriously? I thought him and Kruger were the only two in the front 7 who showed up early in the season.

@tour2ma said:

Well...in the famous words of Mr. Gomer Pyle.....su-prise, su-prise, su-prise.....

Here's the rating summary...

D-line: Rubin -14.3; Taylor -6.5; D. Bryant -6.5; Winn -7.7; A. Bryant -3.4; Hughes +5.2; Kitchen -2.7; Fua -11.4

http://www.cleveland.com/browns/index.ssf/2015/01/why_season_was_a_mixed_bag_for.html

LBs: Dansby +13.9; Kirksey -3.7; Kruger +9.7; Robertson +2.2; Sheard +8.2

http://www.cleveland.com/browns/index.ssf/2015/01/a_challenging_season_for_the_d.html

@tour2ma said:

If they're not shooting the gaps upfield that means they're infront of their blockers. The sheer size of some of these guys means the LB'ers come free most of the time even if the lineman is shit. Which our guys weren't. They did what Oneil asked them to do this year and stayed back. Should have been a good year for our LB'ers. Again, account for what Robertson did at the end of the season with an even shittier and depleted D line infront of him....???? Why was he able to get off his own shot?

@clevfan4life said:

And our d line pretty much did that well enough.

Sounds "pretty much" like bullshit...

@thenew23 said:

Oh, I thought NE still ran a 3-4. I think the game I watched that's what they were showing mostly with 3 DL and Ninkovich as the Jack. But playing Kruger as the Sam?

@mudfly said:

I need to see where you got those numbers and what they mean by "outside". If they're calling off guard runs "outside" than ok. But Kruger and Sheard let nothing break to the outside shoulder of their tackle. Lot's of runs went off guard just to the inside of our OLB'ers and you hope that a good OLB'er can at least get his hands on a runner as he's going by, but technically if that runner did not break containment and was forced inside the edges have done their job. I know for a fact they did cause I rewound almost all of the big runs to see who's fault it was. If our edges were letting everything get outside why did Oneil have them pinching in midway through the season to help clog the middle? See it's this kind of stuff that people who played can pick up on. As soon as I saw Kruger and Sheard trying to start spinning inside off their tackles I knew Oneil was desperate. Those stats you are giving are perhaps soiled by late season performance when our edges were asked to do this.....and yes I then also saw a lot of things breaking outside. But beginning of the season, all of the runs that broke outside were on Mingo which made me facepalm a lot. But if he had a broke AC the whole season I understand...I tried playing through that bullshit too and it's nearly impossible to be an effective tackler nor shed an OL.

@tour2ma said:

And our d line pretty much did that well enough. I watched our LB'ers go untouched into the wrong gaps time after time after time. And in any case, good lb'ers can shed OL. Our guys would get taken out of the plays by WR's and TE's consistently. Our DL did not press upfield like it did last year under Horton, as evidenced by the sack regression. So they were staying back and holding up blocks. Our LB'ers were just not often in the right place. Why is when Robertson came in at the end of the season, with the same "shitty" DL, he was getting through to the top level and making a lot of plays behind the line of scrimmage?

I've always seen Big Phil in that mold and as Mud has cited, our best run D game came during his all too brief, Week 10 return from injury after the D had gotten in sync.

Agree on the speed observation... speed makes sense if the line occupies the opposition's "beef" on run plays. Then hole-filling speed vs. the run is as useful as it is in drop-back coverages.

@clevfan4life said:

New England's DC Matt Patricia runs a 4-3 Under defense, which is slightly different than our 3-4 Over. The main difference is 4 hands-down D-linemen and 3 stand-up linebackers vs the opposite. Just like the 3-4, run-stopping starts with the 2-gap NT - and their defense is 100 times better when Wilfork is healthy and playing that position. The overall size of their front 7 helps as they line up 2- 300+ linemen and 3 260+ DE/OLB-type players. Having 2 DE's to contain the outside, and an extra 270+ OLB (Hightower) allows them to out-man the opposing front 5 basically setting up their ILBs to do some damage. Their Sam and Mike LBs have essentially the same responsibilities as ours. They have to have good size, but the most important quality is playing well in coverage.

We could run our 3-4 over with: Taylor / a new NT / D.Bryant and A.Bryant as the Jack/DE with Kruger in the Sam and that will open things up for Kirksey/Dansby to clean up the middle. That would give us the size up front that NE utilizes.

The problem is, Pettine and O'neil seem to LOVE speed on defense. They would rather push A.Bryant as a lineman and utilize Mingo's athleticism against opposing TEs and RBs instead of putting those responsibilities on Kruger and A.Bryant. It makes us smaller on D, which ultimately creates openings for opposing offenses.

@clevfan4life said:

If you look at the run stats.....right, left, center.....you will see that most of the yardage was gained to the outside....(Kruger/Sheard/Mingo)....

We only allowed 5 runs of 10+ yards over the middle......BUT we allowed 37 runs of 10+ yards to the outside.....(real numbers, btw)

So, thats more than 7 times as many to the outside as the inside.....so, perception is everythjng except reality....

And I agree with the argument that teams piled on, after they identified our weakness....making it even worse.....yes, we gave up more rushing yards this year...but we also were the "2nd most rushed on" team in the league with 500 attempts against us....which only magnifies the issue

So....based upon the real numbers.....it would appear that the hybrid outside backers failed at a greater rate than the inside backers....

..

foolish to just look at some stats to say Horton's defense was "better"...

renders a lot of stats from before meaningless.

The Browns have a lot better secondary now, so teams try to run more.....

injuries.....stop living in the past.

We'll see the improvements that take place next year.

Fix a few problem areas - and it should be a wild ride next season.

@clevfan4life said:

woefully wrong. I gave my opinion about why "I" think the run defense sucked this year, and gave some empirical evidence to back it up. Yet I still acknowledged that I may be wrong and wanted to hear from people who actually knew how the game of football was played. Those of you, including yourself, who say it's the d line stupid.....clearly show you don't know how the game is played. That's not me saying "I'm completely right and you're all completely wrong"...but there's certain facts to football you can't get around. One of those being that if you're getting gouged on run defense up the middle you have to look at what your LB'ers are doing wrong. If you dont' understand that you really don't know the game of football. Now exactly why those LB'ers weren't doing their job...is what I was trying to get at in this discussion. How much of it was scheme and how much of it was on them. Said plenty of times I'd like to hear what Oneil was doing with our LB'ers that was so different than Horton was.

Woefully inept analysis of someone's else's writing. Really. You can agree or disagree with someone but at least grasp the basics.

Grasp this... *points to crotch*

I've been beating the LB drum for years... almost since I joined the board. However, anyone who knows the game knows that in run D the primary job of the D-line is to keep the O-line off of the LBs, so they can make plays... especially true of the ILBs. Hard enough for 1st stringers to do let alone guys promoted from the PS due to injury.

As for your thread performance... I stand by my original analysis.

@thenew23 said:

I'll admit that at the beginning of the season I wasn't eyeballing the DL on every play, but it didnt' seem to me like they were getting blown off the line. I would have noticed OL getting downfield untouched on our LB's. It seemed to me in the new scheme that they were not trying to get upfield like they were in Hortons gap scheme...as evidenced by our sack count being lower this year. So it did seem like they were trying to chew up the blockers. I dunno, I'd have to go back and look. But the one thing that I wholeheartedly disagree with you on is the edge setting from both Kruger and Sheard, cause that I did watch and it was something that was in my mind to keep an eye on this year even before the season started. At the beginning of the season nothing, and I do mean nothing, broke to the outside. Both Kruger and Sheard consistently got their man upfield and sat in the bounce lanes. And that was just fine with the other teams cause they just ran off center and guard all game long and it couldn't be stopped. The only times something broke to the outside was when Mingo was in, unfortunately. You're right he's not built for what they asked of him. I actually think he'd make an awesome 4-3 OLB. As the season progressed though you could tell that they were asking the OLB'ers to pinch in and help in the run, which of course resulted in RB's managing to escape interior containment.

This is what upset me so much about our early season run defense. You could blame the DL for letting the RB's get to the 2nd level consistently, I get that...but after that, those long runs are just all on the LB'ers. The whole issue that people had with DQ the previous season is that he was making tackles too far behind the line of scrimmage, well at least he was making those tackles. Our guys just got run right by. These werent' grinding big backs we were facing, those yards that were getting made on us were on a lot of big runs. You could make an argument that if teams were handing the ball off 30-40 times against us and getting those yards that they just ground us down. But how many times at the beginning of the year did teams have near or even over 100 yds by half time? On less than 15 carries. People say it's a passing league and we're set up for that. Fine. I'm even ok with averaging 100 yds or a little more on run defense. But not 150. If this year was cause of our scheme..that scheme has to go I don't care passing league or what. Look at our schedule next year. If Lynch is still in Seattle we're gonna deal with that nightmare plus SF who you know is gonna give Gore/Hyde 20 carries by halftime. It's gonna get ugly next year if we still have the same aw shux attitude toward stopping the run.

So you sound like you really know what you're talking about. What does NE do with their ILB'ers that's different? Those guys are monsters and seem to go out in coverage just fine.

@mudfly said:

Well....those last seconds weren't so good against the Colts, Ravens and Steelers.....all games we lost with less than 10 seconds left

And our TOP against the Bengals and Panthers was 21 minutes because the O went 3 and out over and over again.......with 40 minutes on the field, the D didn't stand a chance in either of these games......

I agree. That's why you have to run the ball.

WSS

@westside-steve said:

Well....those last seconds weren't so good against the Colts, Ravens and Steelers.....all games we lost with less than 10 seconds left

And our TOP against the Bengals and Panthers was 21 minutes because the O went 3 and out over and over again.......with 40 minutes on the field, the D didn't stand a chance in either of these games......

WSS

PS was there a noticeable difference in the games we lost in the 4th quarter?