[MIJB#19]

General Manager Notes: Good start or 8-8 bound?
The 2014 regular season has begun.

As I'm writing this, I'm sitting here with mixed feelings. Let's start with what looks like good news: the division standings.

1. Maassluis 3-2
2. Gothenburg 3-3
3. Paris 2-3
4. Bordeaux 0-5

How about that, 6 weeks in the books and we're at the top of the division! The caveat is that we've played 3 of those 5 at home, which were the victorious ones. There's more reason for optimism as we beat Gothenburg 30-11 in week 1 and beat the Tucker Tigers (4-2) in week 5 with a 29-16 score. In between we beat the Atlanta Vipers 37-13 and lost at the Outer Banks Ospreys 33-17, whilst outgaining them, but hampering ourselves with interceptions. Today's 34-27 loss at the Augusta Greenjackets was another case of outgaining the opponent whilst losing the turnover battle.

So, why the mixed feelings? Well, it feels like we rolled a lot of sixes already and got only 3 wins out of it. I'm afraid that our awesomeness has nowhere but to go down from here on, but let's go over some impressive numbers anyway.

QB Evan Drake is 1st in the league with 8.17 yards per pass attempt.
That's right, a Merchantmen quarterback is leading in the "per attempt" category, not the "per catch" category (Drake's third in that). The really interesting part is that in all these games he's been spreading the ball around. Not just incidentally, but consistently. Sample size? Maybe, but getting the ball into 10 different pairs of hands has been a trend. WR Calvin Maxwell and WR Vinny Buysse were each targeted 41 times, they have combined for 44 catches 703 yards and 4 touchdowns. Buysse on his own is 4th on the team with just 190 yards receiving. But we're winning, mostly, so, who cares? Yeah, maybe I'm a bit obsessed with wanting our expensive receivers to prove their worth by making 10 catches per game for 150 yards, not just 4 catches for 40 yards.

The defense is 3rd in yards per carry allowed with a 3.60 figure.
That is shocking, since we already played run happy Gothenburg and Tucker. But at the same time, is it really that much of a surprise? We invested in a lot of run stoppers with DT Ben Courcy, DT Gabriel Morris and the linebackers quartet of Coleman, Desimone, Burks and Halvorson. Basically, we should be a strong run defense by now with Morris and Coleman growing into elite players at their position.

The defense is 5th in yards per pass attempt allowed with a 5.70 figure.
Overall, I find pass defense to be erratic or hard to grasp on, at least more so than the run defense. Both are subject to the flow of the various games played, but in essence, we've being doing well in this area, apparently. For one thing, this can't be credited to our pass rush. We're under 20% in pass rush percentage and in particular on an all time low in sacks. But, we all know "sacks" is a volatile figure. You never know when a defense with the kind of pass rush talent we have finds a sack magnet on the other side of the line of scrimmage and pummels him to his back 7 times. The individual players aren't looking particularly awesome in their stat lines in pass defense figures, but if you know me a bit, you know I don't believe in those figures telling the story, they're circumstantial.

Our offense is 3rd in yard per game.
This comes back to the passing game being productive as we're equally 3rd in passing yards per game. QB Evan Drake's low so far was 270 yards. His high of 394 yards? You guessed it, it came in a close loss. That's football, right? Our running game has improved to being medianish.

And then we remember that 5 games is just so little data to seriously prove a point. We're playing well and we're actually having only 3 wins to show for it. Were we lucky to play well (and still lose) and will it even out by us throwing for 250 yards from here on and allowing 350 yards on defense again? Or are we for real and have we had our couple of anomaly losses? Only time can tell.