About this so called collapse....

[Gman329]

I am so tired of these lazy sportswriters looking only at wins & losses, grabbing the low hanging fruit and calling what we're going through as another "collapse". To me, a collapse is when you're playing at a high level and suddenly start playing worse. I would argue that we've played at roughly the same level all year.

 

Lets look at those first 8 games, when we went 6-2. Throw out the best and worst performances - New England, when we played by far our best game of the year and Seattle, which I think was the worst. (At the time we thought the win in Philly was huge but with the benefit of hindsight, we see Philly was in the middle of losing 4 of their first 5 games, on their way to 4-7. )

 

That leaves the loss to Washington and wins over Philly, St Louis, Arizona, Buffalo & Miami, who sport a combined record of 22-44...and I'd remind you that those wins were ugly! We won but did not play well. There was LOTS of grumbling here.

 

And I would submit we played at the same level in those wins as we did in the last three losses. Do you think we would have beaten SF or New Orleans if we played them in the first half, playing at the same level as we did against those teams above? I don't. Do you think we would have beaten St Louis, Arizona or Buffalo the last few weeks? I do. And then those same writers would be saying they're "getting hot down the stretch", which would be equally misleading.

 

Most of the preseason predictions here were between 7-9 on the low side and 10-6 on the high side, with most of us clustered around 8-8 and 9-7. And at the end of the day, that's just about where we'll be.

[Tempest]

10-6 is what we're going to need for the playoffs and not beyond this team.