Seattle Bets on a Plus-Size 'D'

haowh

看看华尔街时报对西雅图海鹰队防守的分析！

Let's not sugarcoat it: The 3-6 Seattle Seahawks look like a lousy football team. They're not favored to make the playoffs, they're nobody's pick to win the Super Bowl and their anemic offense ought to be disinvited from Thanksgiving dinner.

But if you watch enough tape, you'll see that the Seahawks are doing something that's so counterintuitive, and so surprisingly effective, that it's starting to look like a genuine innovation.

Nearly every other NFL team is trying to cope with the league's preponderance of pass-happy offenses by bringing in quicker, nimbler defenders—especially in the secondary. The Seahawks are going in the other direction. They've built the second-heaviest starting defense in the NFL—behind Buffalo.

To put this in terms Seattleites will understand: Your football team has just walked into the world's fussiest espresso bar and ordered a venti.

From the perspective of television it's tough to see how big football players really are. But if you watch the Seahawks long enough, it starts to seem like they're playing in a laboratory where the laws of physics have been slightly tweaked.

It starts with the defensive line, where Alan Branch, Raheem Brock and the other two starters weigh a combined 1,213 pounds. They're so massive that when running backs collide with them, they sometimes look like junkyard dogs who've run out of chain. The Seahawks allow an average of 3.6 yards per carry, fourth-lowest in the NFL.

If an offensive player is lucky enough to make it past the line without rupturing a spleen, he'll next have to contend with linebackers K.J. Wright and David Hawthorne—246 pounds each—and strong safety Kam Chancellor, a 6-foot-3, 232-pound rhinoceros in cleats.

But the most striking difference comes when opposing quarterbacks try to throw the sorts of passes they've been throwing with impunity these days: the short and precisely placed timing pass or the jump ball to a tall receiver. This season, the Seahawks picked up a pair of oversized cornerbacks no other teams seemed to want: Richard Sherman, a 6-foot-3 former wide receiver from Stanford (a fifth-round draft pick) and Brandon Browner, a 6-foot-4, 221-pound cornerback who'd been banished to Canada.

Sherman and Browner are the tallest cornerback duo in the NFL. By all rights, they should be too slow to dominate top receivers. But the Seahawks don't expect them to go stride-for-stride with receivers on deep routes. It's these shorter routes where they excel—basically by reaching over the receivers' heads and batting balls away.

Gus Bradley, Seattle's defensive coordinator, said the system works if these jumbo-sized cornerbacks play conservatively on deep passing routes—trying not to get beat—but play tighter coverage than usual on short passes. "We can be aggressive on the slants and hitches," he said. "The big thing is to stay on top of the receiver."

Sunday, the size advantage proved handy on third downs, when offenses typically like to throw to big, trusty receivers who can outmuscle defenders for catches in traffic. Toward the end of the second quarter, Baltimore was down 13-7 facing a third-and-6 on its own 14-yard line. Lining up in shotgun with four receivers wide, Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco threw to a big safety valve, the 6-foot-4, 250-pound tight end Ed Dixon. Just after Dixon grasped the football, however, Chancellor, the safety, reached over his helmet and batted the ball down.

Flacco and Dixon looked flabbergasted. The Ravens were forced to punt.

At the end of the third quarter, down 22-7, the Ravens faced another third-down deep in Seattle territory. Flacco noticed that his favorite target, receiver Anquan Boldin, was matched up man-to-man with Sherman. He lofted a fade pass to the 6-foot-1 Boldin in the right-hand corner of the end zone—the kind Boldin is adept at reeling in. This time, however, it was Sherman with the height advantage. The ball was batted away and Baltimore had to settle for a field goal.

Thanks to Seattle's anemic offense, which ranks near the bottom of the league in total yards and has turned the ball over 16 times this season, the Seahawks spend more time on defense than all but one other NFL team—something that has taken a toll on their stats.

This, combined with their losing record and the fact that they play in a secret location in a forest somewhere north of Los Angeles, has kept this defense from earning many props.

If there's any hope for the Seahawks this season, it's that the team is finally beginning to gain ground in the time-of-possession fight. The team's running game is improving behind a young offensive line that's beginning to jell.

The Seahawks were able to run the clock out Sunday to put the Ravens away. To become a real playoff contender next season, the Seahawks may only be missing one player: a franchise quarterback.

fcking

针对现在进攻更多选择传球的趋势，海鹰也迈出自己的一步了，利用大块头的CB来阻挡短距离上的传球，turnover的机会似乎是增加了。看看NE的双子杀法，这周对喷气机的表现就很能说明问题。或许CB能很好的在速度上紧跟TE，但是TE接球后利用身体优势更容易摆脱防守，从而争取更多的码数。联盟时刻都在变化，也许这正正是它其中一种魅力吧。

ARodgers

翻译贴已经弄好了，http://www.tdl100.com/thread-20439-1-1.html
感谢你的原帖

隔壁王老师

咋是英文的呢？