Thanks GBB. Your thoughts and impressions are always insightful and interesting to read. After going through this thread, I feel like the comments this week are overly focused on the negative aspects of yesterday’s game, perhaps understandably because of the stressful second half. I’m not disagreeing with the majority of your comments really, but I did think there were some notable positives that really haven’t been discussed, and I’d be interested in any responses to let me know if I’m misreading the situation:
1) The offensive line continues to dominate our opponents. No sacks again this week, and it didn’t really even seem like Luck faced a lot of pressure. Maybe our rushing stats weren’t as great this week, but it seemed like JAX was determined not to let our RBs beat them and perhaps that helped open up the passing game in the first half.
2) Ebron and the other TEs. With the notable exception of Alie-Cox’s miscue in the second half, the TEs performed exceptionally well yet again this week.
3) Our passing game thoroughly dominated the JAX defense in the first half. Remember, JAX’s defense, even after yesterday, allows on average only 200.6 yards per game.
4) The vaunted return of Leonard Fournette was a dud. He averaged 2.2 YPC on 24 carries against our defense, certainly not what JAX was hoping for. Backup Carlos Hyde did even worse – 1.7 YPC on 5 carries.
5) Though we had no sacks, we recorded nine tackles for a loss (versus only 3 by JAX). I couldn’t quickly find a team stat to see how this stacked up to other teams, but it seems like we beat our opponents in this category nearly every week. Ultimately, however, we just had a hard time making these count yesterday because we’d let JAX convert on 3rd down.
I’ll add one general comment on the negative side – it seems like the Colts’ tackling has really regressed over the last several games. There were several critical missed tackles this game which allowed JAX to continue drives that otherwise would have stalled much earlier – most notably the Moncrief miss and the fake field goal, but those certainly weren’t the only ones. I think if our tackling was surer (as it was earlier this season), the game wouldn’t have been nearly as close.
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