[shanklingill]

Originally Posted by Hammer

I think putting an Offense in uncomfortable situations will be a strong factor in making a pass rush look good. I see stud DEs dominate on good teams much like I would expect. On weaker teams they don't tend to post such pretty stats.

Is there a link between top individual pass rushers by year and top teams with great win records? I think if you went back even 20 years, you would find a lot of the best pass rushers in a given year played for poor teams. Strahan got sack leader with a terrible NYGs team in 2003, and Allen did it with a Minnesota team about 10 years ago that barely won. And didnt Houston have like a 1-15 year around the time JJ Watt was at the peak of his powers.

Also worth looking as well at home many of those pass rush leaders came from better ranked teams, but how much of that overall team success boils down to defense. I think when you isolate both together, you are left with very few top pass rushers (if any) who played with dominant top ranked offenses. The current pass rush leader in 2019 played with an offense that had near historical levels of turnovers, and were often put in terrible field positions.

Hence if the teams you are facing, have plenty protection to the QB, throw short and you are blitzing everyone, is really easy to break that defense of yours in pieces.

It seems a bit of a heavy assumption to say I am blitzing the hell out of teams. On the contrary, I dont feel it necessary to overtly blitz because the quality of my blitzers should be adequate to create pressures from more conversative approaches. I hardly ever use blitz 2 or overstack blitzers.

Also a bit of an assumption to think my defense is being taken to pieces, which it isnt. The question raised was specifically in relation to how my pass rush performs not my team.

Side note - I think Patriots had the most 5/6 plus man rushers last year on their play calling and topped the league defensive stats, so calling a proportionally large amount of heavy blitzes did seem to result in them getting torn to pieces.

If you can save and reload, I'd try that roster with a 100% Recommend defensive setup, and see what that gets you. It's just a way to try to control for something weird in your gameplan that might be inadvertently sabotaging your outcomes.

Its not possible to change any dynamics of front line defenses in your game plan save from setting the base formation. Save from rare plays were FLDs drop into coverage in RL, they will be doing the same function irrespective of what happens behind them.

In RL last year, there was a strong correlation between being able to rush the quarter back without bringing additional blitzes (and 2018 I believe, stats after that are harder to come by in detail) and team defense performance. Teams like SF and SD were right at the top of the defensive rankings and also commited hardly any linebackers into blitz plays (think both adopted 4 man rushes about 80 percent of pass plays). And their front line D wracked up a lot of sacks. New England went the other way and were successful.

So really as long as I am generally conservative and not rushing everything at a QB or as long as my play calling isnt being shredded for being terrible, which it isnt, then I would expect my front line to perform. My whole defense in fact is pretty excellent, I have a slight weakness (52 ovr) in FS, but thats hardly a bad weakness. Ive invested hard and got very good draft picks, my Team ranking end of year is 100/100.

SO in short, I have a team/system capable of keeping a QB quiet in pass production and keep him in the pocket longer. It doesnt translate to pressures like it should.

Not really sure how my game plan can get my front line D to the QB more.