Studs: I thought Gary and Quay both had really good games. Honestly to my eye Quay did just about everything right for 99% of the game so I’m not going to be too ******* him for getting penalized for trying to make a play in crunch time. (10 solo tackles!) At bare minimum I wouldn’t consider that to be remotely close to the same “attitude” or “discipline” issues he had last year. It’s not like he just got emotional and lost his head. (And I don’t really understand why that’s a rule in the first place but it is what it is). Gary continues to look like one of the premier edge rushers in the league and we should be preparing ourselves to give him a very, very, very handsome payday.
Doubs continues to impress me and is pretty clearly a legit starting quality player. I think I said it before but he looks to be more and more of a “security blanket” option for Love. I’ve been really happy with Reed too. Yes he had a big error (though to be fair avoided disaster) but I chalk that up to also being young/inexperienced and getting too aggressive in trying to make a play. Overall I think he’s progressing very well.
On the whole I would say special teams have been just fine. Whelan had a good showing and Carlsen so far seems to have silenced a lot of the worries/complaints from preseason.
Our first three-play series on defense was about as good as I’ve seen from us in recent memory. Unfortunately that was about as long as the good performance lasted.
I wouldn’t really call Love a “stud” tonight but I was again impressed with how he continues to look totally unshaken and like the moment is never too big for him. He was running for his life out there, down huge, and still believed (or at least acted like/made others believe) that we still were in it and could come back. I know he got sacked 5x and Detroit was credited with 11 QB hits; I’d be curious to see how many pressures they were credited with and Love’s average time to throw. And while he had two picks I didn’t really think either were particularly “bad” ones with the second being Doubs fault IMO. Pretty sure that throw was right on the money if Doubs continues running that in-cutting route.
Duds:
Our OL had about as bad of a showing as I can remember. Yes they were out arguably their two best players (at least on the left) but many of us seemed to think OL /OL depth could be a strength for us. Walker had a very decent showing last week but this week he didn’t even look like a practice-squad level player. Similarly Newman is another guy who didn’t look like he belonged amongst professionals at all.
Joe Barry’s defense… i think it was Maya Angelou who said something to the effect of “When someone shows you who they are… believe them the first time”. Barry has shown us over and over and over again “who he is”. We know exactly what we’re going to get out of him yet keep expecting something to be different. He has no business coaching another single down for this team. I’m pretty sure at one point I saw Van Ness in coverage on 4th and 3. Enough said.
Dillon continues to look poor. Yes, his OL wasn’t exactly paving the way for him, but at the same time it looked like often times he was running AWAY from what little openings there were and TOWARDS contact. He runs much, much smaller than he is. I try not to be too harsh on the guy because I really like him and do feel in some ways has been a bit mis-utilized but for the season thus far he looks like he could be easily replaced with just about any average FA RB.
And finally I think I have to call LaFleur a dud for this one. I like the guy too, and I think he’s a good coach, but man he just can NOT prepare on a short week, apparently. It feels like he is pretty regularly getting out-coached in big matchups and his clock (mis)management continues to baffle me. I simply don’t understand why time after time after time we’re going into halftime with timeouts in our pocket. I feel like at this point Love is a big “rhythm” player but it doesn’t feel like he’s being called early plays designed to get him into rhythm. And i cringe every time I see us pull out the read option, which looks like a disaster waiting to happen at every turn. And much like how LaFleur stuck with Drayton until he was quite literally responsible for playoff elimination, he seems to be okay with letting Barry do God-only-knows how much damage before working up the courage to send him packing. I’ve lost count at this point how many times he’s said something to the effect of “we’ve got to change things” or “we’ve got to do something different” and then we change nothing and do everything the same.
I really do like LaFleur and think he’s a good coach overall, but at this point I’m pretty sure I’d swap him with the guy on the opposite sideline last night in a heartbeat
