Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
And for my entire football watching life I would have agreed with you.
Then I saw how teams defended the 2021 Chiefs - they did. not. care.
It's what made CEH largely ineffective even when we gave him the ball. Give him the ball 20 damn times - they didn't care. They weren't going to come up. Let him have 5 - Hill and Kelce are so stinking good that they're STILL not coming downhill. They'll give up that 5 and wait for you to make a mistake before they come downhill and let Hill/Kelce gouge them for 30.
Throw underneath all day - you will not pull those safeties up. Because for about 8 weeks we DID over the latter part of the season and no, they weren't drawing safeties up on us. They were staying in the deep shells. They don't give a rip. They simply won't.
Moreover, I conceded that I'd rather have a do-everything X who can get deep AND run pristine routes over the middle. Of course that's preferable. But you CANNOT spend $16 million on Robinson, $15 million on Kelce, $20+ million on Hill, $20+ million on OBJr and $15 million on Thuney. You've dropped $85+ million on 5 players and haven't paid for your QB yet. That's simply not tenable.
So you have $5 million to spend on your WR2 - tell me what Landry or JuJu are going to do to convince these guys to pull their safeties down. We saw last year - they simply don't care. There isn't a universe where getting beat at 6 yards/pop by a plodding possession WR is going to be less of a worry for teams than getting torched over the top.
Conventionally I absolutely agree with you. But never in a million years did I expect what I saw from teams against this Chiefs team in 2021. I don't think Veach or Reid expected it either or they'd have never drafted CEH. Teams willingness to completely sell out against us because they simply didn't care if we took that short stuff is completely unprecedented. I've never seen anything like it and I said so at the time.
You can't attack what teams are doing against this squad like you would what they're doing against teams that don't have Hill and Kelce. Those 2 are just too damn good to scare teams with guys like Landry as a 'counter'. He'll never begin to tilt the scale in his direction.
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The thing is that CEH will never make them move up because he's simply not good enough no matter how many times we give him the ball. Teams would move their safeties up if he was actually effective the games where he got a lot of carries. But if you're going to run the ball, and still be average at best at it, why would we change the defense?
Also even when we tried the underneath stuff, it was still too heavily dependent on Hill and Kelce. So we were taking away our biggest advantage just so we could take advantage of what the defense was giving up. We needed a guy that could keep Hill going down field and he could command coverage underneath and vice versa. We just had nobody, so defenses didn't have to change anything. Just stay back and force them underneath to Hill and Kelce cause no one else can do anything.