Here is the review of our Defense, which was an all out disaster on Sunday. There is no other way around it. Unfortunately Brian Urlacher didn't have the gumption to come out and say it, and so Alex Brown did. He said that our defense "stunk" and that they played "horrible" in the game. Nothing could be closer to the truth, although I believe that stunk and horrible aren't powerful enough words to describe what was going on (any ideas for would have been an acceptable term?). We truly were outplayed on both sides of the ball, as Chad mentioned in the comments here. However, at least with the offense there was something, albeit small, but there was still something to hold on to after this game. Our offense came back from behind and gave us a chance, we may not have deserved it but they gave it to us. All the defense gave us was a big fat turd.
Where do we start? The line didn't do diddly squat. Tommie Harris is playing on a bad leg and finished with one tackle. I am really concerned about this; seriously the guy was limping back to the line of scrimmage. He isn't 100% and it is hurting our team, but then again we are in a conundrum because we are so thin at DT we are playing Alex Brown there... yeah that's right, we are playing Brown at DT now. Mac, Jurko, and Harry suggested that we sit Harris for the next two weeks and bring him back for Oakland after the bye week, but I don't know if we can afford to lost another DT. The bottom line is that our line was good for nothing and got continually owned by the Vikings offensive line. They mauled us. There were times when the RB was spotted 6-8 yards before he was touched, that is, if he was touched to begin with. Our linebackers were also victimized by the blocking throughout the game and gave us absolutely nothing to be happy about.
Aside from Charles Tillman the secondary was a joke. First off, Adam Archuleta misses tackles as it is, and he is even worse with one arm in a cast. I didn't expect him to be 100% or dominant, but I thought he could do a decent job against a vanilla passing offense. Tillman did fine, but he could stop the bleeding. The thing I really don't understand is why we shifted our best safety (not saying much) in Danieal Manning to CB and put Brandon McGowan in there? This isn't working at all. McGowan is horrible at tackling. On the first run by Adrian Peterson he could have stopped it, but just hit him and bounced off of him instead of wrapping him, or at least slowing him down. Furthermore, I don't understand the coaching staff's decision to move Manning out of position to CB and essentially take one hole in the defense and make two. Manning is a part of our future at the safety position, and to move him out of position is only going to slow his development. Then, on top of that, shifting things around in the second half they put in Trumaine McBride at the CB position. He did a serviceable job, but I don't understand why we didn't put in Ricky Manning Jr. at corner to begin with! We invested over 20 million dollars in this player and we are stubbornly keeping at nickel back! I don't understand this at all and shuffling around players isn't going to help anything.
To top it all off we allowed Adrian Peterson to unleash record after record and put on an offensive show. Granted, Peterson is a big time stud, but as Brown said, "I mean, the kid's a good player but ... dang. We shouldn't give up that many yards rushing." I think we can all agree. Look, before the game WCG mentioned that we had to stop him. Another Blogger bemoaned that he wasn't being used as much as he could have been and that he was going to be special. Well this week was his coming out party and we got owned. Give credit to the guy for putting on a great performance. He is extremely talented and will have a great career, but Brown had a good point. It doesn't matter how good the guy is, the team shouldn't give up that many rushing yards.
This gave was a colossal disaster from the start, and after all the small things that gave us hope (Hester's return, the offensive comeback) we were still let down. I am still angered by this, and I am still grossly disappointed with the coaching staff. I will bring more about that later, but for now please help me bemoan this horrific loss.