Here you go - I posted this in another thread and you tell me whether they make a difference or not?RazorsEdgeAZ wrote:Some of you have real deep faith / hope. I guess I don't. I have blind spots with AZ, but I tend to lean on facts or trends...
I may need more faith. I just don't see anything concrete (trends, stats related to trends as a team, facts) that lead me to think or expect Turituri and Ippolito healthy this year would have made much a difference. Some difference, maybe. But enough to overcome total defense or scoring defense differentials (at being pretty bad).
Both played last year, think both may have had some starts. LY defense still finished toward the bottom of FBS. What's concrete that it would be any, much different TY if healthy? Another year? That's back to hope. Neither were highly recruited. Unless you're counting that scheme and Casteel would make them stars or really good players. So many are commenting negatively on scheme, Casteel and others on coaching that if Turituri and Ippolito played it would be much better defense TY that scheme, Casteel and others not an issue any longer.
Those two would have made it much different because they "would" be real good? Same goes for Deandre Miller and some others. I just don't see for myself that there aren't real depth issues here. Recruiting issues here. I just can't make the leap of faith that those aren't issues. Bigger than the injuries.
Personally, I think it's more recruiting related. Just poor recruiting on defensive side team wise. I lean towards even better recruiting with Casteel and sticking with 3-3-5that the defense would be much better. I also believe that's harder to recruit better recruits to a 3-3-5 so there's that. I also can't believe coaches philosophy is to build a defense around one, maybe two guys and take on the risk if they go down to injuries we should understand the entire defense would struggle or collapse. Maybe go from near bottom of FBS to just about bottom of FBS if that happened. Which it did.
Scooby made everybody else better because of his ability and I would think that nobody would argue that point? Who was 2nd in TFL's LY after Scooby (29)? Parks with 13 followed by Ippolito (6.5), Gilbert(5.5) and Turituri(5). Of the guys coming back who was the leading tackler after Scooby? Parks, Ippolito, Gilbert and Turituri. Of the guys coming back who had the most sacks after Scooby(14)? Gilbert and Turitur with 3 each. So of the 5 leading defensive players we had LY only 2 are healthy in Parks and Gilbert.
Our leading tackler TY is Parks with 51, followed by Allah, Neal and Magloire. Parks is the only one that has played every game. 20 different players have at least 10 tackles on the year. 30 with 5 or more. Our leading tackler LY was Scooby with 163 total tackles. The 4 guys mentioned above beat Scooby out by less than 10 total tackles.
So LY we had a total of 59 TFL's amongst the 5 players (98 as a team) mentioned above and TY we have Parks and Gilbert with 3.5 each and Turituri with 2. For those of you scoring at home that's 9 with 3 games left. As a team TY we have 45.
LY in sacks we had a total of 20 amongst Scooby, Gilbert and Turituri and 38 as a team. TY we have 17 as a total defense. Banda with 3 and Worthy with 2.5 lead the way.
You could argue that the 3 guys we could least afford to lose on this entire team were certainly Scooby and any combination of Parks, Gilbert, Turituri and Ippolito. We lost 3 of the 5 most important players on this D and 3 of the 5 best players on this D, including the single most important player. But it's all about scheme, gimmicks and coaches.
