Maybe Dungy can’t bring in quality defensive players because all the cap space is tied up in the offense, specifically Peyton. In that respect Peyton could go out and keep the defense from allowing 375 rushing yards by restructuring his deal to allow the team to bring in more talent. Of course Tom Brady has shown that agreeing to less money doesn’t help anybody.
One problem with focusing on offense is that while it works great for winning games in the regular season, the playoffs take place in winter, not fall. Bad weather dictates that teams that focus on defense have the advantage. Oddly, even with HFA in the dome the Colts are still master chokers.
As for Eli, he does appear to be an “accelerated” Peyton. As one of many possible examples, his 23-0 wildcard humiliation at the hands of the Panthers came years earlier in his career than Peyton’s 41-0 wildcard humiliation at the hands of the Jets. Sadly, the answer to “which Manning will win a Superbowl first” is more likely to be “neither” than either one of them. Maybe their kids?
It’s not so much that Dungy hasn’t done a good job with the defense; it’s that the defense isn’t very deep. Look at the injury list:
Harper, N. DB day-to-day - Undisclosed - 12/11/06
Collins, J. TE day-to-day - Groin - 12/5/06
Stokley, B. WR out for season - Achilles - 12/11/06
Bethea, A. DB day-to-day - Shoulder - 12/11/06
Sanders, B. DB day-to-day - Knee - 12/10/06
Clark, D. TE day-to-day - Knee - 12/7/06
Reagor, M. DT Out indefinitely - Head - 11/6/06
Doss, M. DB out for season - Knee - 10/23/06
Simon, C. DT out for season - Knee - 10/5/06
Cory Simon was huge at stopping the run last year. Bob Sanders is a hard hitter against the run, as well. Montae Reagor was reasonably good. I think you put these guys back in the lineup and the Colts are back to at least the middle of the pack on defense.
I don’t think it’s just numbers. Fran Tarkenton held a lot of records, but he isn’t lauded like guys like Manning, Favre, and Elway. Great quarterbacks, all, but all hyped by the NFL machine and honks like John Madden. We’ve been through the Peyton coronation before. Gaudy numbers in the season, great W-L percentage…
…then the inevitable collapse in the playoffs.
Even Broadway Joe got to the Big Party once.
I don’t think it’s impossible to say that Manning will eventually get to the Superbowl. And eventually win. But the Colts are in the dominant conference, and it isn’t like the old days. I think you have a 2-3 year window to take advantage of the opportunity before age, injury, and parity catch up. Dungy and Manning are basically off the clock. Reid and McNabb are facing that reality right now.
Defense wins championships. Until NBA legislated defense out it was true there too. The Bears are there because of d. The Colts do not have enough defense to win the big ones. How many surprises have Super Bowl winning QBS been. Reps are made for QBs in the big one but defense gets them there.
Right. Even the Rams, who were the most Offense-First team to win the Super Bowl in recent memory, won the game on a defensive stop (when Mike Jones tackled Kevin Dyson on the 1 yard line at the end of the game).
I know everybody loves to do it, but I don’t see why everything has to boil down to a three word formula. I mean, every team has an offense and a defense, right, and they play against the other team’s offense and defense? It’s possible for either to win or lose a game, and usually they each do something somewhere in between. Saying the Rams won that game defensively is really stretching it. By that logic, every game that ends with a field goal, even if it’s a 3-0 final, was “won” by the offense. Technically true I suppose, but what point does it prove?
The fact of the matter is, there’s only one way to fill in the blank in the sentence “___ wins championships” – playing better than the teams you play (and even that isn’t a guarantee, I suppose). If you can force six turnovers, fantastic. If you can blow the other team off the ball and run for 400 yards, tremendous. If you’ve got a quarterback that can pick the other team apart under pressure all night, spectacular. It doesn’t matter how they do it, somebody just does it every year. Kurt Warner throws for 400-plus yards and no interceptions, Rams win the Super Bowl. Kurt Warner throws for 365 but throws two picks, Patriots win. Then again, Tom Brady throws for 145 yards, Patriots win; Tom Brady throws for 354… Patriots win again. It’s a football game. Isn’t it possible that every year there are a million things that could happen, and the team that wins is just the team that goes out and does it as opposed to the team that sticks most closely to some kind of blueprint?
My point is that there’s no magic floating around a football field that’s going to prevent the Colts from winning the Super Bowl just because they play the “wrong” style. Sure, maybe some approaches have been used more frequently and are traditional because they’re safer or more accessible, but that’s not to say that a team that has some of the rare pieces you need to build a team another way are barred from winning. I really don’t understand the mindset that leads people to say (about anything) that, even if you’re really fucking successful at doing things your own way, you’ll never get anywhere because previous successes have done it another way. And, of course, in this case, it’s not even true that all previous champions have done it any particular way. Look at the Patriots – what’s their formula? Iit’s not even especially clear what it is that they’re so good at, other than winning. They just do whatever the hell they think is going to work.
It’s probably worth pointing out, by the way, that Peyton Manning’s playoff numbers, despite the two clunkers that everybody loves to bring up, are very good.
The Steelers were supposedly defense-led last year, but it’s easier to play defense after you’re up 14-zip in the first quarter, and it wasn’t the defense that bailed them out against the Bengals. The Seahawks got to the Super Bowl because of that offensive line.
The '04 Patriots were the second or third best offense in the league, and their secondary was so bad that they had an ad in the Boston Globe for defensive backs. The Eagles were led by their passing game and didn’t need a strong run defense most of the time.
The '03 Patriots were a defense-led team (despite similar offensive personnel - the differences were Corey Dillon and another year of Brady’s development), as were the Panthers.
Unconventional approaches would be given more respect if they started producing Lombardi trophies. Every year they don’t is yet another reason to suspect that they can’t.
Overall, yes. In his nine career playoff games, his numbers are:
193 of 322 (60%) for 2461 (7.6), 15 TDs 8 Ints (89.05 passer rating)
But if you break them down into wins and losses, there is a stark contrast. In his three wins – against Denver, Kansas City and Denver – his numbers are inhuman:
71 of 89 (80%) for 1138 (12.8), 12 TDs 1 Int (153.65 passer rating)
12.8 yards per attempt?! That’s inconceivable. Conversely, in his six losses – against the Titans, Dolphins, Jets, Patriots, Patriots and Steelers – his numbers are pretty bleak:
122 of 233 (52%) for 1323 (5.7), 3 TDs 7 Ints (61.15 passer rating)
Bearing in mind that the bleak outings outnumber the stellar performances by two to one, it’s a bit disingenuous to say that his playoff numbers are very good. A third of the time he’s so ridiculously good that it overshadows the crappy performances he gives the other two thirds of the time.
This isn’t compelling. The Steelers beat the Bengals 31-17, so it’s hard to say how much “bailing out” they really needed. And the bailing that did happen was the defense knocking Carson Palmer out of the game after one pass. So if anything, the defense did actually bail them out.
As for the Seahawks and Eagles, they didn’t win championships, so you can’t really cite them as examples of why “defense wins championships” is flawed. To be fair, “not sucking” has generally been good enough to win the NFC since the mid-90s.
Marvin Harrison has the same look whether he’s been shut out of the game, or if he has 3 touchdowns. This was commented on during a primetime game sometime this year IIRC.
Part of the Colts’ defensive problems are the offense.
They’ve built a one gap penetrating tampa 2 style defense designed to stop the pass. One of the reason they did that is because their offense could consistently get a lead, forcing the other team into needing to pass. Because of this, last year, their defense looked pretty good.
Of course, injuries are also a significant problem. Their safeties were a big part of stopping the run, and they’re not using both of them.
But Indy has played it close most of the year, their offense isn’t clicking, and since teams aren’t way behind, they can run to exploit the Colts’ weakness. If Manning and crew could still put up 20+ points in the first half, their defense would be in better shape.
That game was a microcosm of the problem with the Colts. They have the #32 ranked rushing defense, having let up 2294 yards. That’s an average of 176 yards per game, 5.5 yards per rush. For context, no other team has let up 1900 yards. So they aren’t just dead last against the run; they are dead last by a mile.
As for Smooth Jack’s injury list, how many injuries were there on opening day when Tiki Barber and Brandon Jacobs ran roughshod over them? The Colts have been soft against the run every game this season. What’s really odd is that they’ve been fine under Dungy up until this year.
Jim Mora era:
1998: 4.7 yards per rush against
1999: 4.2
2000: 4.3
2001: 4.7
Tony Dungy era:
2002: 4.3
2003: 4.5
2004: 4.6
2005: 4.4
2006: 5.5
It’s clear that the Indy defense has fallen off a cliff in 2006. If you can’t stop the run, you can’t get the opponent off the field, and Peyton can only watch from the sideline. It’s one thing when a team gashes you with passing yards. But when they steamroll you on the ground, it’s just demoralizing.
What “convention” are we talking about in this context? Teams that don’t have horrible defenses? That’s obviously not my point; I was responding to the notion that quarterbacks don’t win Super Bowls, defenses do; that there’s something inherently wrong with Manning and his gaudy numbers that will prevent him from winning a Super Bowl because that’s not how you win. All I’m saying is the Colts could easily win a Super Bowl with a middling defense. There’s no reason a team whose offense is much better than its defense can’t win; it happens all the time.
Other than Baltimore and Tampa Bay, I don’t think you can even really make the argument that any Super Bowl team, going, say, 20 years back, was a team that just leaned on a great defense to win games. Plenty of teams have won Super Bowls with a lot of offensive firepower. There’s probably more examples of a great offense/OK defense championship teams than there are the other way around.
Plays better in wins than losses? That’s inconceivable! Look, his numbers are his numbers; even games in which your numbers are extra good count as playoff games. Anyway, with such a small sample, I could have done the exact same thing with his two very bad games and said he was the world’s greatest postseason quarterback if we discount his awful performances. But I didn’t, because all I said was, despite the fact that he’s universally condemned as a playoff stiff, his playoff numbers are very good. Which you just said was true.
If he won more playoff games, there’d be a bigger sample. Just sayin’.
Personally, it just seems weird to me to argue, “Hey, Peyton does great in the playoffs except for all the losing.” Well, weird, at least, to make that same argument while saying that defense isn’t what wins championships.
The fact remain that the Colts’ defense ranks 18th in the league in total defense. That is, in no way, shape, or form worse than when Dungy took the job.
Yeah, their rush D sucks, but their pass D most certainly does not. Some teams actually do pass the ball.
Sorta. Their pass defense is 2nd in the league in fewest yards allowed, but only 12th in yards per pass play, which is a better indicator of how good or bad a defense really is against the pass. Why the disparity? Because they’re 1st in the league in fewest passes attempted against? And why is that? It’s at least partly because…yep…they’re so bad against the run. Seriously, if you were an opposing coach and knew you could rack up 5.4 yards per rushing attempt, why *would *you pass?