LeBeau to sign deal to stay as Steelers' defensive coordinator

[TRH]

well.....thats good news....although its not going to be a casual year.....he has alot of focus work to do in the D-backfield and attacking passing schemes. Definitely has his work cut out for him.

[stb_steeler]

Personaly i think Dick knows about all the situations he needs to address. But its not all on his shoulders. Did you ever hear him on sound bites always tellin the D, lets finish it now keep on them. Maybe its those who dont execute his plans. We'll have to ask dick himself when we get a chance.....

[Merchant]

I don't think it's fair to blame the success of westcoast-offense type teams against our defense on Lebeau's scheme.

Here is the golden question... Is it the scheme to blame? or is it the execution of the players? Well when your best corners behind Ike are Gay and McFadden.. I'm gonna go ahead and take a wild guess and say that the players should absorb a portion of the blame as well.

[steeltheone]

I hope he is not being slowly pushed out for this Butler guy....What has Butler ever done but watch Lebeau?

[Curtain_of_Steel]

Dick comes up huge again, lol.


Hopefully he see's a need for some changes though. With our schedule I think we can domaiunte through the season, but as we just seen in the SB we were exposed a bit. With the colts an dpats on the schedule lets get over that hump and run the table.

[FanSince72]

Originally Posted by Merchant

I don't think it's fair to blame the success of westcoast-offense type teams against our defense on Lebeau's scheme.

Here is the golden question... Is it the scheme to blame? or is it the execution of the players? Well when your best corners behind Ike are Gay and McFadden.. I'm gonna go ahead and take a wild guess and say that the players should absorb a portion of the blame as well.

Like anything else, it's not a black and white issue and the answer is that it's a little of both.

It's no secret the we're heavy on "Front Seven" philosophy and our secondary is weak overall. I'm not placing the blame entirely on LeBeau, but let's face it, he has a great influence on what kind of personality our defense has. Certainly it comes down to execution, but if our tendency is to emphasize the front seven, then perhaps we've been neglecting the secondary by default and that neglect leads to poor execution simply because the focus is somewhere else.

Whatever the reason, I don't think anyone could argue that our secondary needs work and that we might need to take a look at our overall approach to defense in a league where passing and pass-based offenses are becoming more common.

Green Bay (and the other West Coast teams) proved that no matter how much talent we can bring to bear in a pass rush, it's all moot if the QB gets rid of the ball before any of our guys can get to him and with five receivers on the field, the chances for completing passes goes up drastically especially since we're committing so much to the pass rush.

If you add in our weak corners, who seem to need safety support more often than not, what's left is a wide-open middle and THAT's where we've been getting killed all year. So to me, the solution lies in having a more developed secondary (with more emphasis on the play of the safeties and CB's) coupled with less "heaviness" in the linebackers in favor of more agility and the ability to cover man-to-man in the short to deep middle instead of just dropping into zones.

Yes, we'd give up a little in the pass rush, but we'd gain much more in our ability to defend against a wider variety of offenses overall and I'll take that over what we have now any day.

[kirklandrules]

Originally Posted by FanSince72

It's no secret the we're heavy on "Front Seven" philosophy and our secondary is weak overall. I'm not placing the blame entirely on LeBeau, but let's face it, he has a great influence on what kind of personality our defense has. Certainly it comes down to execution, but if our tendency is to emphasize the front seven, then perhaps we've been neglecting the secondary by default and that neglect leads to poor execution simply because the focus is somewhere else.

I'm siding with Merchant on this one. Lebeau's zone blitz philosophy is not a "front seven" philosophy. What you are seeing is a d-coordinator working to the strengths of the players he can put on the field. Lebeau's defense can be credited for the initial decline of the West Coast offense that was widely popular in the '80s. He knows what to do, but doesn't always have the players to pull it off. Also, I wouldn't consider Troy roaming around to be part of the "front seven" philosophy. Here's a link that provides a very good summary of how Lebeau's strategy has evolved (and we can assume, will continue to evolve):
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/201...itz/index.html