Dom pulled a Sanders

[El Duderino]

A few times this year and it frustrated me

The defense overall was obviously better than last year and i'd take Capers any day over Bob Sanders. That said, i really felt in yesterdays game, the two Vikings losses, and in the Pittsburgh losses he just lost his nerve and it hurt us. Granted, plenty of blame is on the players who need to cover guys and beat offensive lineman, but i was frustrated by Capers.

In all of those losses, Capers went into the games deciding he wouldn't blitz because they were facing QB's who are great beating blitzes. That fine and understandable. As games are being played though and you're playing coverage while only rushing four about 85-90%, if that plan is getting eaten alive over and over and over and over, try something else please besides once every 10 downs sending a linebacker up the gut. That was vintage Bob Sanders.

Yea, sending a corner and/or a safety with a linebacker could result in giving up a big play. To that i say so what!! It's not like rushing the same 4 guys was preventing long pass plays anyways in yesterday's game and the other losses i mentioned where the defense actually faced a good QB. For as much as we shredded the AZ defense alive in the 2nd half, two corner blitzes in the game helped pressure Rodgers into turnovers, including the game winner.

In each of those losses, it felt like i was watching a rewind to losses last year with a stubborn Bob Sanders running the defense and him absolutely refusing to take any chances even as the pass defense was getting shredded to death by a QB with to much time to pick apart a secondary with obvious liabilities like Bush and a QB seeing the same defense nearly every down.

[Wade-A-Holic]

I'm as frustrated as anyone but 1. Capers did blitz and offer different looks and 2. Warner was getting the ball out unbelievably quickly. Blitzing him wasn't accomplishing anything.

I listened to 5 minutes of radio today. Capers was the popular scapegoat. I disagreed completely and turned the radio off.

The only thing I'd fault Capers for is not playing more man defense. Aikman was dead on when he said the combination routes were confusing our secondary and zone coverages. Even if we did play more man, though, evidently receivers are now allowed to run over corners in order to get open, so you can't even blame that on Capers.

[MadCityBucky]

I think it was just one of those games where nothing you called would matter. Warner, an elite QB, was on fire and like Rodgers in the 2nd half, it didn't matter what you threw at him, he was going to make a play. It seemed that only Matthews was able to get pressure though. And like most of the games we lost, we lose the turnover battle.

I believe the announcers said something about coach Whiz. believing the middle of the Packers D was very exploitable, and well he was damn right because they just gashed that area of the field all night long.

[El Duderino]

I'm as frustrated as anyone but 1. Capers did blitz and offer different looks and 2. Warner was getting the ball out unbelievably quickly. Blitzing him wasn't accomplishing anything.

I listened to 5 minutes of radio today. Capers was the popular scapegoat. I disagreed completely and turned the radio off.

The only thing I'd fault Capers for is not playing more man defense. Aikman was dead on when he said the combination routes were confusing our secondary and zone coverages. Even if we did play more man, though, evidently receivers are now allowed to run over corners in order to get open, so you can't even blame that on Capers.

The only few blitzes i saw all game were one or two linebackers up the gut. If there was a single corner blitz, safety blitz, or overload blitz on either side all game i don't remember seeing it. The exact same thing happened in the two Vikings games and Pittsburgh games.

I've watched Warner play a long time, the guy is an incredibly accurate passer. The only thing i've ever seen that consistently affected his accuracy is pressure. Soft zones and time to throw is a wet dream for Kurt Warner. By halftime if Dom Capers couldn't see that his game plan going in wasn't working in the slightest just as it hadn't worked vs Fare or Roethlisberger, i don't know what game he was watching. He's not a stupid man so he had to see that this plan wasn't working yet again, yet he kept doing the same thing.

How is that not on him? What was his fear of sending 6 guys a few times on an overload blitz or corner/LB blitz? That we'd give up an easy big pass play? Hello, rushing four or sending one linebacker up the middle gave up countless big pass plays anyways. Capers spent nearly the whole game in a prevent defense that prevented zero big pass plays. Just as it prevented zero big plays against Favre twice and Roethlisberger. Why do you think the Arizona DC sent a six man corner blitz on the play that won the game? He probably knew there was almost no chance the four man rush zone defenses that Rodgers ate alive would hold up before Aaron marched us down for a winning score. So he said fucckk it, sent a risky blitz instead of sitting back on his heels and hoped for a big play and got it. Sure it could have backfired on Davis, but he saw vividly clear what happened when he rushed four and played zone behind it, 35 points in the second half.

BTW, i won't claim to know that Capers taking some real chance would have resulted in a turnover or a sack or two. I do know though that he played a passive defense with little adjustments nearly all game Sunday just as he did twice against Favre and to the tune of 500 yards against Roethlisberger and each time his game plan got utterly destroyed. When Sanders did the same crap last year, he got vilified for it.

[El Duderino]

Read McGinn's piece today and my eyes weren't off base, Capers blitzed on a season low 4.9 percent.

Basically, Capers played a prevent defense for the whole game and never came off it even as it was failing miserably.

[Wade-A-Holic]

Read McGinn's piece today and my eyes weren't off base, Capers blitzed on a season low 4.9 percent.

Basically, Capers played a prevent defense for the whole game and never came off it even as it was failing miserably.

Wow. 4.9% is astounding. Given how quickly Warner was getting it out and how bad our tackling was in the secondary, I'm not completely sure it would have mattered much, but I agree with you. Between that and the lack of man coverage, it just adds to the frustration for me. Given the type of games Capers has called against inferior opponents and what he's done against good offenses with good quarterbacks, it's clear to me that he doesn't trust the personnel he has to run his exotic blitz schemes yet. Unfortunately, he has to live with that and take some chances. Hopefully with another offseason and a few more pieces in here he'll have the ammunition he needs to be in attack mode against good offenses.

[Captain Erv]

Capers speaks

By Greg A. Bedard of the Journal Sentinel
Jan. 13, 2010 5:42 p.m.

All three coordinators spoke to the media today. We'll be bringing you some of their comments in the coming days, but figured you all want some answers about the defense off of Sunday's game. So we'll start with defensive coordinator Dom Capers.

(Why did the defense struggle against good quarterbacks?)

I can speak to Sunday. No. 1, we knew going in we were facing a quarterback that was a rhythm thrower and very accurate, and you have to be tight in your coverage. There's not much margin for error. He was hot. We didn't match their routes nearly as tight and efficiently as we had the week before. This is a humbling business. The margin for error when you get into the playoffs becomes less and less. We obviously didn't get the job done in terms of tackling. You've got to make sure there's not much yardage after the catch. And we weren't nearly as efficient. It's hard to get pass rush on a guy that's going to get the ball out of his hands that quick so you have to make sure you're very sound and tight in your coverage. And we just didn't execute with the type of efficiency that you need to against a good passing. And what happened to us can happen to you very easily when you don't do those things.

(Anything you could have done different in calling the game to stop some of that?)

Well, we did try a lot of different things. When something's not working quite the way you want it to, then you go to plan B. Let me just say that Plan A, B or C did not work very well, which was obvious. Part of that... I think it was two-fold. I think that you had a very hot quarterback that was executing very well. His timing of his throws didn't leave much error in terms of your coverage and then our execution. You can't miss on some of your coverage matches and missed on a few coverage matches which gave them some things. And then they earned some. That's a good offense. They can move the ball on anybody at anytime unless you're on top of your coverage unit.

(So you blew some coverages?)

There were a couple things, just base fundamentals. Things that we had worked in practice and had come up and you don't expect when we've seen those same things numerous times in practice. And seen us match them up OK pretty well in practice. I don't know whether that comes from the heat of the battle of playoff contest where the tempo picks up. But we didn't execute with the same degree of efficiency that I'd seen us the second half of the season.

(Whether he thought the team had the wrong mentality going into the game...)

I didn't sense it. As a coach you're always concerned about what your mentality is going to be going into the game. I know that we had a very highly efficient game the week before there. So maybe it's human nature to... I expected us to be much more efficient than we were. I think that's probably what Charles was talking about. When you came back and looked at the tape from the week before and, really, you saw an awful lot of the same things that we'd seen the week before. It's just that they executed them better. We didn't execute them as well.

(Can you play physical at the line with receivers if they're motioning or stacking?)

There's different styles. We were in a lot of 4 on 3 and 3 on 2 and when you can do that, certain guys can be aggressive and certain guys you don't want to be aggressive. But the style that we played, which we've had quite a bit of success doing, it comes down to timing many times and I'll say this. After the game I said, 'Give Kurt Warner credit.' Because he had the ball out of his hands and we'd seen in our preparation all the games when people had pressured him and even when we pressured him, if you go back and look at the tape, we had guys free but they never got there because he got the ball out of his hands before they could get there even when they were flat free.

(Are Pat Lee and Will Blackmon solutions down the road?)

Well, I hope. With Pat Lee, really both of those guys, our exposure was limited in the off-season program and training camp. Until you get see guys in regular-season games and how they respond… we feel both of those guys have some ability obviously. They were up and playing in our sub packages. In this day and age you can’t ever had enough cover people. Like what we went through this year, with all of a sudden Pat Lee, Will Blackmon and Al Harris, those guys go down and you start facing teams with four wide receivers on the field and you have to match people up on them. I just think as we go through our off-season evaluations and those type of things and start to evaluate the number of sub defense you have to play because it’s become such a three- and four-receiver league, you have to be prepared to match those things. If you anticipate maybe losing two or three guys you have to make sure you can still match up. If you can’t, then it has to affect your scheme and what you do.

(Did it affect what you did, having so many untested newcomers playing in the secondary?)

I don't think there's any doubt. Every week that's what you're doing. We probably did it more than anybody in the league with 21, with Charles. One week he was playing dime matched up with a tight end and the next week he was in nickel and the next week he was at corner and he might be at safety during the course of the game. We tried to get what we think are the most advantageous matchups for us. And as you watched us, that changed a lot... We felt that way going into the game on Sunday that we were trying to get the best matchups but our coverage matches didn't work nearly as well as they had the week before.

(Will zone play be one of the areas you look to improve for next season?)

When we installed the defense, we showed a lot of teaching tapes of other people doing things where now we have an awful lot of good tape of us doing them the right way, not doing them quite as well as we want to do them. So I really believe that will give us an advantage with these guys being able to watch themselves and us be able to point out that this is the way we want this done, this is the way it looks when you're doing it well and these are some of the problems you have if you aren't doing them well. I'm excited about that because we're going to have a whole library of tapes to teach from with all the different techniques and to me that's where you make progress, where they have it down when there's no doubt in their mind about things.

(On Brad Jones)

...I was really pleased with the progress he made. For him to start the number of games he did there at the end of the year, for a guy his size he played fairly physical. You can tell he's not afraid to mix is up in there from a physical standpoint. We always thought he had an innate pass rush ability and I think he's got enough athletic ability to go out into coverage. So I think he did a good job. There's a lot of things he can improve on. I think he probably surprised a lot of people. I can think of three coaches that came up and asked me, 'Where'd you guys find this guy in the seventh round?'

(Do you expect teams to follow Cardinals' lead and double Clay Matthews?)

We're going to see that. You don't have to look at much tape. All they had to look at was the tape from the week before. We anticipate that so, yes, we have to respond to that. You get one guy that starts to do the things that Clay's done here the second half of the season. Clay's going to get a lot of attention from now on. It's not going to be a secret now they're going to have to find a way to block Clay Matthews coming off the edge.

(Disappointed with inside linebackers on Sunday?)

As I looked at Sunday's game, we took turns. It wasn't any one area. I like our inside linebackers. I like them a lot, I think we've got a good group. But we took turns at every position. There wasn't anybody that you say, 'This was the problem.' In general we didn't tackle very well. You have to tackle well against them and that's a base fundamental that you teach and you've got, with an accurate quarterback that is a rhythm thrower, you have to be very close in your coverage matches and we weren't nearly as close as we needed to be and we had been the week before.

(What do you attribute that poor tackling to)

I wish I knew. Because I’ve seen us tackle well. I don’t think that’s been a weakness of ours. Now it was Sunday and that’s a base fundamental you have to be able to count on every week. Part of it is leverage angles, people pursuing. The more people you get going to the ball (the better you are). The more spread out you are the more space there is. So I think sometimes your missed tackles rise because everybody is spread out all over the field.

[PkrsBcksGphsMqt]

The Sporting News has announced Capers as coordinator of the year. 53 current head coaches and executives voted.

http://www.packers.com/news/stories/2010/01/13/2/

[Ayt]

It's embarrassing to be winning all these awards after that game, but they earned it in the regular season.

Capers actually did a ton when you consider he had Poppinga for a couple games then Matthews on one side, and a DE that looked out of place followed by a 7th rounder on the other side at two of the most key positions in his defense.

Just think how bad we would have been if you simply removed Matthews from our D.