In the movie Mr. Baseball, an old pro baseball player (Tom Selleck) moves to Japan for his final couple years of professional ball. When he gets there, he does well until his opponents discovers a hole in his swing. Selleck cannot hit the Japanese Shuuto pitch and strikes out every time. He eventually learns to adapt his swing and curb his crude racist attitudes and winds up hiting the pennant-winning RBI. Dom Capers’s 3-4 defense seems to be similar to Tom Selleck’s swing: it has a major hole that can be exploited at will.
Fortunately for the Packers, many teams in the NFL do not have the personnel to exploit this weakness. There are three keys to exploiting the weakness in the Capers defense.
1. A veteran, elite QB who is capable of reading defenses and making good decisions. This season the packers faced three quarterbacks that fall in this category: Favre, Roethlisberger, Warner and possibly Tony Romo. All these quarterbacks, with the exception of Romo dissected the Green Bay defense. Favre, Roethlisberger and Warner combined this season for 71.7%, 1,397 yards, 15 touchdowns and no interceptions. Beating any team that throws for 350 yards and 4 touchdowns is going to be hard. Next year the Packers will face Tony Romo, Eli Manning, Donovan McNabb and possibly Brett Favre twice.
2. The opposing offense must have 3 or more talented receivers that can run routes, get open and catch the ball. The Packers do not struggle at minimizing the impact of one or two talented receivers. Forcing the Packers to play nickel and dime consistently seems to take the fire out of Capers’s belly. The Cowboys lack three talented receivers; Roy Williams was shown to clearly not be at the talent level needed to fit the formula and, consequently, they were shut down.
3. The third and final key to devastating Capers’s defense is to run a spread offense with many of the routes going over the middle. The Cardinals ran their receivers, Early Doucet and Steve Breaston, on routes over the middle time and time again. Then on the run the Cardinals would run wide and avoided the Packers strength. Taken together this marginalized the Packers’ main defensive strengths: pass defense on the perimeter and up the middle run stuffing. The Packers in their nickel and dime are vulnerable over the middle. The Cardinals, Vikings and Steelers threw the ball early and often at that part of the field. The middle of the field out of the spread formation is where these elite quarterbacks tend to rack up their yards with 5 – 15 yard high percentage passes.
There’s a lot of hope for the Packers defense. They have a lot of talent and played with several rookies. Next year we should see the return of CB Al Harris and CB Will Blackmon. Hopefully Ted Thompson can get a veteran safety to help Atari Bigby or even compete for the starting position. Capers will hopefully spend a lot of time this season figuring out how to stop teams that pass over the middle and run to the outside, because the weakness in his defense is now known.
Pass rush, pass rush, pass rush. What unites the three QBs mentioned that carved up GB is that all three can handle the heat, and GB couldn’t generate any pressure at all against these teams. I’m sure Capers will make the appropriate adjustments after an offseason of dissecting these games.