Ron Swanson wrote:El Duderino wrote:[quote="Ron Swanson"
It's both. For some reason though you act like Ted Thompson's best friend and want to ignore his very obviously failings in both drafting and acquiring defensive talent over the last 5-6 years.
If Ted was able to draft and acquire defensive talent as he has on the offensive side of the ball since becoming GM, the team would have had more success.
The TT criticisms sure as hell seemed to die down when we won 8 straight, then predictably ramped all the way back up after our defense got murdered by an offense that knew exactly what we were going to run and predictably exploited the same weaknesses telling of Capers' antiquated pass coverage scheme, just like how we've ended every season since 2010.
Not from me. I knew this was a very flawed defense even during the winning streak and it's why i wasn't confident at all entering the playoffs. Aaron Rodgers has been covering for Ted's mistakes on defense for awhile. That and Ted doing much better at acquiring talent on offense instead of defense.
Take Atlanta. Remove Rodgers and Ryan from each team. There isn't a GM in football who would prefer the Packers overall roster over the Falcons and both have a highly paid QB. The better and clearly more talented team won.
"It's a talent issue" is the most overused cliche in sports. Look at all the UDFA's that have needed to be plugged in at points during the season and how adequately they performed in the absence of injured guys (Brice, Allison, Jayrone Elliot, Joe Thomas, Lane Taylor, Gunter, etc.) and tell me how he's somehow supposed to find All-Pro guys instead.
The talent problems on defense is only a cliche in your Ted Thompson groupie mind. Pretty much everyone who analyzed the Atlanta game said their offense vs our poorly talented defense was going to be a massive mismatch and it was.
Since Ted only uses the draft, if he wants to finally land some impact impact players on defense, he'll have to start drafting them instead of whiffing so much. Players you mentioned like Brice, Gunter, Elliot, Thomas etc are just spare parts. Other teams find guys like them all of the time. Gunter was thrust into a number one corner role he wasn't talented enough to handle because Ted whiffed on Randell and Rollins. Capers for all of his faults was sent out there with D level talent to face an A level talent on offense. Problems with that unit though goes deeper than Atlanta.
Go ahead and keep being Ted's lapdog and blinding yourself into thinking he put together a talented defense, but few else locally or nationally are buying that crap. Just look at his drafts on defense since the Super Bowl win. Way to many busts or mediocre players in the first four rounds and no big time gems stolen in rounds 5-7 outside of maybe Hyde who was a good pick, but nothing special.
Capers needs to go, but until Ted starts doing a lot better building defenses, they will continue being below average to bad on that side of the ball.