Tuesday, February 22, 2005

The Mystery That Is Ray Rhodes

ok, I know this is already my 2nd thread...but I thought this was interesting...

If past performance is indicative of future performance … then what does the future hold for Hawk fans? Like a nomadic hunter, Ray Rhodes has migrated his way across the NFL landscape … as he has never appeared to camp anywhere for too long. The Seahawks defenders under Steve Sidwell often found themselves scratching their heads trying to follow schemes as complicated as a Harvard Lecture (which is fine if the Hawks want to draft more Kacyvenskis.) Rhodes took the katana to the playbook with his simplified attack first defense … and watched the defense immediately improve. Indeed, Rhodes’ defenses have repeatedly shown a pattern of quick improvement … but for one reason or another the armor begins to rust at an extremely accelerated rate afterwards.


Now, the above writing isn't the greatest part of the article, but if you click on the link, it will show a good source of how Ray Rhodes' defenses fared overed the years in several categories, including how much Wistrom's injury hurt our team (actually has charts for all of Ray's defenses' rankings in the past)...this is great for the stat-happy guys out there and features a few nice things from Ronnie Lott, among others

5 comments:

  1. Big surprise coming from you Sho. :)

    Lets see how his defense does with experienced, healthy players that now understand the scheme.

    It's not rocket science, the players just need to do their jobs, ie, read the offense correctly, recognize adjustments and audibles, and most of all the Vets need to stay on the field.

    But Sho thinks that it's the scheme...sorry man, even Belichick's schemes wouldn't have worked with the guys we had left on the field last year.

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  2. And Sho, how do you explain the fact that he has one of the highest turnaround rates of any coordinator in the league?

    I'll wait. :)

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  3. 1) You make it sound like the injuries were limted to a couple of players, and spread around throughout the team, but the reality is it was to our starting pass rushers, Brown and Simmons are our best pass rushers and we lost them for a hefty part of tha season, and then we lost their backups, White and Lewis.

    These are not things that you can just adjust for, no matter what your' coaching abilities are, you can't make passs rushers out of third and fourth string LBs, not to mention the fact that we lost Bobby Taylor for most of the season and Damien Robinson for the entire season.

    Now we also have to throw in Wistrom and Tubbs as well as the torn rotator cuff injury that Bernard suffered and played with for the last part of the season.

    I guess all I can say to you is watch and see how this so-called bad Coach's defense does this season. I'll bet you'll be eating your' words.

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  4. And your' comment on Rhodes 'whole time here'....two seasons and the first with a team handed to him.

    His claim to fame is 'building defenses' and to that end he's in teh process of building anothe Eagles type defense, but to make it work, you have to have your' playmakers on the field. and that's all there is to that. But hey, hate the guy all ya' want, it just makes it easier to give ya a hard time next season. :)

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