Regular season overview
Well, we seem to have landed back into our groove. 10-6, wild card, rated the #10 team in the league, and that sounds about right.
QB Mathews regressed to only a 99 rating, and that's not good enough. WR Duran has regressed to being
merely a 110-yard per game guy, and that too is not good enough. The running game remains stale.
Surface numbers from the D look pretty good. Average yards per carry allowed is better than usual, and we were #9 in yards per attempt allowed passing, #1 in pass rush %, and #1 in completion % allowed. We didn't generate turnovers, though. So, we didn't suffer too much from our mucking up lineups to get guys starts this year, it seems.
Basically, I think Duran's transcendent talent made our team better than it should have been. Jam him 15 targets a game, he'll churn out 140 yards, and we were just tough to stop. Now if he's just a 7+ yard per target guy instead of 9+, that means a lot of drives ended. We aren't an elite offense behind Mathews and a bunch of Grade-B guys, which is who we are now.
I think the team would be better off running my more basic offense. I'm pitching it around like mad right now, and that is probably counterproductive. If we were throwing 1/3 less and running for 5 yards a clip, maybe we'd be a power team, rather than a fringe contender.