by monkey » Sat Feb 01, 2014 10:22 am
You know, something that hasn't been talked about much, even though the media tried to make a mountain out of a mole hill after Richard Sherman's piece in MMQB rating the QB's by intelligence, is the fact that Manning's arm strength has in fact gone the way of the dodo.
They can all laugh about his "wounded ducks" and dismiss them as "who cares so long as they arrive on time and at the right place" (which I at least partly agree with BTW), BUT there's a problem with so quickly dismissing this fact.
You see, when we were facing Colin Kaepernick, we actually had to account for two things that Manning cannot do that Kaep can: 1. Obviously Kaep can run like nobody's business, and 2. Kaep throws HARD! His fastballs are insane, just ask Earl Thomas who actually tipped the ball that ended up as a touchdown because of how hard that ball was thrown. That was some serious heat, and is something Manning no longer has.
Since Manning can neither run, nor throw hard, what he will have to do to beat us is dink and dunk.
He cannot challenge Earl Thomas deep the way Kaepernick can, and we don't need to use a spy to account for him either. Those are big advantages for Seattle's defense. We free up an extra defender, no longer needing to use a spy, AND Earl can be used more freely to come up and defend passes as well.
Manning may very well dink and dunk us to death, he will have to settle for taking whatever we give him, time after time, always throwing to the most open player, but he CANNOT make any mistakes, or those wounded ducks underneath WILL end up going the other way!
Can he win by dink and dunking us to death? Yes, he's certainly capable of that!
That is in fact how he'll have to do it if he wants to win, because he HAS no other way of doing it.
If he tries challenging our secondary by making tough throws into tight windows, then he will throw INT's.
Now here's where the Seahawks defense has yet another huge advantage, the philosophy of our defense, and the reason that we consistently use the cover 3 single safety deep hybrid look we use, is because our defense is DESIGNED to allow underneath stuff if a QB is patient, while taking away the deep stuff and tightening up in the red zone.
So you can move the chains between the twenties on Seattle, teams have done it all year, but the yards that QB's put up against our defense means spit, because we ALLOW it, in order to NOT allow deep stuff and touchdowns in the red zone.
What we make QB's do is be patient, throw more often, giving our defense more time and chances to make stops on third downs, make big hits, and make big picks or fumbles.
My point is, our defense is DESIGNED to match up with QB's like Manning! Manning relies on timing, relies on his receivers being in the right place at the right time...our defense STOPS that by being more physical than any other.
So while he is the most heady QB I've ever seen play the game, and he won't make a lot of mistakes, he ALSO won't make many BIG plays either, he won't because he cannot throw with enough velocity to throw into tight windows, and because he won't be able to throw deep with Earl Thomas roaming around deep, he just doesn't have the arm strength to do that.
He's going to have to be patient and wait for our defense to make a mistake in coverage, so that he can exploit it. Meanwhile, our defense will be doing the EXACT same thing, patiently allowing him to dink and dunk, waiting for him to make a mistake, or to throw one of his wounded ducks into a window just a little too tight, so we can take it back the other way.
This is why I've been saying all season long, there's not another team in the NFL better suited to destroy the Broncos.
And don't even get me started on how much of an advantage we have over Denver's defense, when they are among the leagues WORST at tackling, especially in their secondary, and we have the top THREE players in the NFL at breaking tackles and getting yards after contact, Lynch, Tate and Harvin.
I've been pulling for the Broncos all year because of the way we match up with them, HOPING they make the Superbowl so we can win, AND no one can say we got lucky and played a bad team (though if they knew just how poorly they match up with us, they might rethink that!).
Everyone will have to admit that we ran the gauntlet, we beat the Saints, then the Niners, who are easily the best two NFC teams after Seattle, (we also beat the Panthers in game one) and finally we will beat Denver.
No one will be able to say the best team didn't win. No one will be able to say we didn't beat the best to become the best.
Small aside: It's my opinion that the Niners, would have beaten the Broncos, probably quite easily, if they had matched up with them instead of us, because they are the one team in the league most similar to the Seattle Seahawks, and they are the second best team in the league hands down. NOT the Broncos! The Broncos would have had a difficult time beating either the Saints or the Panthers if they had played in the NFC, they're not as good as the media would have you believe they are or as most people think.
