Mike Ditka

[SFW]

This morning Mike Ditka said he had "never seen a more undisciplined defense" and "had never seen a worse concept on defense" then he did with the Chargers last night.

Before the game Mike Ditka had picked the Chargers to win.

[Marshall/Boogie]

Yeah, I was listening to that...

[KNSD]

lol, chargers hold Broncos to their three lowest point totals this season, and....

[Steve]

I thought our tackling was fairly poor, but otherwise was reasonably good. The big problem was that we kept getting beat at the point of attack. In terms of attacking their gaps and not playing all over the place, I thought we played pretty well. This is really the first game this season where I can say we got beat us physically, rather then mentally.

In hindsight, maybe the one thing we should have done differently was play more base D, especially in the 2nd half. With the wind making it hard to throw downfield, let Manning take his shots. Jump the short routes and bring in an extra DL to attack the line and keep the LB and DB clean. But they beat us at the point of attack, running at the ILB/LDT bubble.

[Bolt-O]

OMAHA = undisciplined.

[SFW]

OMAHA = undisciplined.

Speaking of the omaha thing. On NFLNetwork last night they were saying that they thought the Chargers defense had a tell on Manning during the week 15 game and that Denver recognized that and used it against SD last night (thus the 5 neutral zone infractions).

[Bolt-O]

Denver must have specifically practiced the hard count...I've never seen an OL react so well on the encroachment. To beat Manning you have to disguise what you are doing, but the Chargers were too anxious.

[SDFan]

defense has gotta stop dropping sure INTs in your hands that could set/change tone of the game!

Where the hell was Ingram yesterday? Invisible.

[Coachmarkos]

I'm pretty sure is was the Five Encroachment penalties...the defense held them to 24 points.

Although I like Ditka, I'm pretty sure he's losing it...he's not keeping up with the modern game. If you listen to his comments, it's usually nonsense.

[Heatmiser]

But..but ....but when the Chiefs lost to the Colts it was because of injuries.

The Chargers? Well I guess Mathews, Clary, Woodhead, Teo, Gilchrist and Addae (for a critical part of the game) don't count.

Gilchrist looked like Rocky vs Clubber Lang out there. That poor guy got clobbered like 5 times in a row until the eventual kill shot by Walker.

TG

[Steve]

We got CALLED for 5 neutral zone infractions. There were only 2 that I saw, and even those were pretty weak. On the 3 non-calls, our guys flinched, but didn't cross into the neutral zone, so those shouldn't have been called.

[Yubaking]

This morning Mike Ditka said he had "never seen a more undisciplined defense" and "had never seen a worse concept on defense" then he did with the Chargers last night.

Before the game Mike Ditka had picked the Chargers to win.

The undisciplined part I understand given the fact that our players jumped offside on 5 occasions, but the scheme comment is absurd. We were in position to make plays all game long, but simply failed to make them at various times as we dropped an easy INT ball, tackled poorly as we have for most of the season, and got physically beaten at the line of scrimmage.

To me, what Pagano did with our defense was nothing short of a minor miracle. We have no legitimate starting NT and no top end pass rusher. While people debate which is the most important for a 3-4 defense, I do not think there is much debate that those are the two most important players to the 3-4 and we do not have either.

Further, as I understand it, we are the only team to keep the Broncos under 400 yards and we did it in all 3 games against, while forcing them into 3 of their 4 lowest point totals.

We didn't lose yesterday because of our defense. I think we lost yesterday because our offense was too conservative for too long and also too predictable with every single first down play being a running play for much of the game, which constantly put us in second and long and a known passing situation. With Denver gearing up to stop the run, I think they were there to be had in the passing game and once we got the blocking issues resolved, they were had in the passing game when we finally committed to it--too little too late.

I definitely like our chances going forward against what appears to be a fading Denver team, especially if we keep Pagano and upgrade our talent on the defensive side of the ball.