here’s my thoughts on the defense:
-i agree that we havent been getting a lot of pressure and i think that falls on the shoulders of lebeau. in the 4th quarter the raiders went to a max protect so the 4/5 man rush lebeau was using early was no longer working. he rarely tried to bring more than 4 ppl in the 4th quarter & when he did it was only 5 ppl AND in a delayed blitz fashion. so the qb’s first few options have to be covered for to allow sufficient time to reach the qb which never happened.
Solution: in the 4th quarter lebeau needs to throw in an occasional 5/6 blitz that happens quickly. a sack on 2nd & 10 takes them to 3rd & 17. that can be a real drive killer where our D no longer has to worry about the short play.

-the loss of a. smith has been huge but the injury to krische has been bigger. the only reason is because the dropoff from krische to eason (hood seems to only rotate in & i’m guessing a rookie Dlineman has to put on a lot more muscle & weight from college to the pros to be really effective) is a lot bigger than smith to krische. go back and check out the games that krische started in and we did a great job of stopping the run. but when he’s injured and eason plays they do a decent job running the ball to the RIGHT side of the line. where eason plays. you also see Keisel & hampton making huge plays sometimes but never eason. this also creates issues in the secondary because they’ll bite more on the run because the Dline isnt getting the job done and that creates holes in the secondary making them out of place. it’s what looks like happened on that 75 TD to Murphy.
solution: hope krische gets over his injury asap & eason goes back to his rotational duties

-i think we don’t have depth in our secondary and thats the big issue. we only have 5 “good” dbacks this year (troy, carter, clark, gay, & taylor). troy’s injury takes us down to 4. townsend has certainly lost a step & 3rd & 5th rd rookies are probably not the immediate solution. going back to last year, a couple of the games we lost (giants & indy) teams came back on us. in those games we had some injuries in the secondary (some during the game) and only had 4 ’good" dbacks.

-i also think farrior has finally hit his wall. more than once, it was him being burned that resulted in a big play. he was too to make the play on the bengals on their 4th down the first time we played them. he was responsible for the 4th down play the ravens had against us. and he hasnt had any big plays this year. i’m hoping one of the changes tomlin is talking about is putting fox in for farrior on passing downs. fox has had more big plays in the few games he’s played in. the other is that hood jumps eason on the rotation chart.

anyway those are my opinions lol