Eye In The Sky Report – Coyle Needs To Bring Something New
Eye In The Sky Report – Coyle Needs To Bring Something New
Kevin Coyle was brought in to replace Mike Nolan as our defensive coordinator this past offseason. How do you think he has been doing? Umm…..I can’t tell you that I have been overly impressed with him, but I do see a few signs of major improvement (Rashed Jones perfect example). If Coyle wants to prove to himself that he does belong as a top defensive coordinator, then right now, right here the spotlight doesn’t get any bigger than this….enter a match up against the New England Patriots.
The Dolphins opened the season against the Houston Texans and you could see Coyle footprint on our team. Reviewing the first quarter of that game, our defensive efforts held one of the highest scoring teams in the league to zero points. However, the 2ndquarter was were the wheels fell off and 24 points were scored against our starting defense. One of the key factors in the game was how vanilla our defensive calls were. We allowed Matt Schaub to sit back and pick holes in our secondary. Thereby, a few whispers started spreading of when Coyle will prove himself.
After the Houston loss, we saw our defensive secondary and front seven implore different techniques which lead to great success against the Oakland Raider, New York Jets, Arizona Cardinals, Cincinnati Bengals, and the Saint Louis Rams. Expectations grew as we saw our first year coach and his first year defensive coordinator have a five hundred record and playoff talk was more than just a whisper. However, the NFL is a copycat league. Once a precedent is set and diagnosed other teams will implore the same methodology. Basically, teams were implementing the same technique other teams used and making it better to exploit the holes or weakness on our defensive team. I am not sure if Coyle was stubborn to believe this or if he honestly believed calling the same type of defensive fronts would work the entire season. Opposing offensive coordinators were able to figure out where the weakness were in Coyle defensive schema’s and attacked them. This was evident against the Colts, Titans and Bills…ironically all leading to three straight losses.
Last week against the Seahawks unfortunately the schema, defensive coverage, fronts and reads were exactly the same as we have previously seen; the only difference is that we were able to pull off the 4th quarter comeback. I don’t believe we will have that opportunity this week. The New England Patriots are averaging 35 points per game, compared to our average of 19. You don’t have hold a degree in statistics to notice the difference.
My question to Kevin Coyle is this, how do you plan on stopping the New England Patriots Offence? What new schemas, formations will we see to ensure that we are not picked apart? If you remember last year, Mike Nolan introduced the ninja defensive scheme that was efficient in the first half of the game. The game did fall apart when our special teams failed and Chad Henne decided to throw more picks than touchdowns. I hope that come Sunday evening we will be able to discuss how impressive our defensive coverage was able to hold up against the New England Patriots rather than how the Patriots exposed our defensive coverage….only time will tell and Sunday can’t get here any sooner!
Good luck Coyle…I think you are going to need it!