This was a horrible, horrible football game. I don’t have much to say about it as not that much went on. It was an uninspired effort against a bad team, and once again the Dolphins did just enough to win in a game they should have dominated. Playing down to our opponent is becoming a bad habit.
Our offense was all over the place. Despite our personnel, we only threw to our wide receivers all day, and our running game was sporadic. Ricky ran extremely well, but the Dolphins didn’t seem to figure it out until just before he got injured. Meanwhile, Ronnie looked frustrated after his benching of sorts (was he hurt?) and reentered to do nothing. The issues came down to a need to simplify and execute, but it never really happened.
Meanwhile, on defense we didn’t hit anybody and had no pass rush. I have discussed before that the simple thing our defense needs to do to be effective is beat the heck out of the opponent, but they just didn’t come to hit today. The result was Stephen Jackson having way too much success against us, and the Rams staying in the game despite Bulger’s terrible day. With no pass rush, our secondary and red zone defense saved us today.
Finally, the special teams were again less than stellar. Carpenter kicked well and our coverage teams were sound for the second consecutive week, but Brandon Fields was bad and nobody blocked for Ginn on any of his returns.
All of that, and we managed to come out with a victory, so it is on to next week and a big divisional game against the Bills. The loss of Justin Smiley could really hurt us against a better team, so hopefully we’ll be back to full strength and will come to play. We need a victory in Toronto to put ourselves in a good position in the playoff race.
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