How did the Bengals do it?

[colin]

in short the bengals saw what was beating them, and had already put in the work to have one in the chamber to fire off in that situation.  they changed up their coverage and pass rush, not to defend every possible thing all the time, but to take hill away.

 

our problem on D is we sort of defend everything all the time.  it gives you great average results, but in a give situation you are defending things that the O has no interest in attacking while not having quite enough to stop what they do want to do.  if the pass rush is working, the McD defensive system is murder on a good passing team (see the carolina D vs manning in the super bowl, only problem was cam did just enough to give the game away, but manning was putrid).  we just don't quite have the pass rush we need, even tho we dump so much into it.  a better DC (and imo if mcd was our DC, or spent more time as our DC he could do it) would have had something in the back pocket like this.

 

the most obvious example of this is how bad we as a team flubbed 13 seconds.  the kick was a joke, but you can make the argument they were scared.  the d that followed was literally insane and i am still convinced someone in our staff thought they had no TOs.  rushing 4 and literally not covering only works when you can't let them get out of bounds.

[papazoid]

Dline showed 4 man but only rushed 3 with 1 dropping into coverage.

 

corners played up aggressive man

 

safeties played deep zone