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Originally Posted by browna
Probably not the worst #1 seed if they get there. It would mean beating SF next week and beating the Rams and 49ers twice this year is no fluke. 12-3 isn’t through smoke and mirrors. The defense is fantastic, Charbonnet and Walker are great complimentary runners and they have the top receiver in the league, yards wise.
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The offense is entirely fake.
Go back to preseason. Kubiak and Macdonald were telling everyone who would listen that this was going to be a running team. We're going to run it down your throat, we drafted a fullback, a first round guard, we're going to play 13 personnel, etc. Hawks fans said, "huh, well, we'll see if the offensive line can make that strategy work, because it sure wasn't good enough last year to protect Geno reliably". Then other teams took that seriously and stacked the box, and it turned out Darnold could, when you do that, throw it over your head to JSN. That was like the first 6 games of the season that they did that and got out to big leads, such that most of the game was garbage time. Look at the Texans game, it was 14-0 in the first quarter and the Texans couldn't score 14 points in a whole game at that point so it didn't matter what happened after that.
Once teams had some tape and figured out what the limitations of the offense were, they stopped it, and it's been bad for like 2 months now, against basically everyone. And the problem is that they just aren't what they wanted to be: they're not a run team. The offensive line CAN'T do it. We were right to be skeptical. It's not Charbs and K9, it's defensive players in the backfield and the offensive line being unable to push forward so that even runs that get stopped get you an occasional 2 or 3 yards. They wind up in 3rd and 8 after a TFL. Before their last TD in this game there was a graphic that said they'd been 3/8 on 3rd down with an average of 11 yards to go - even going 3/8 in that situation is a miracle.
If they had been what they set out to be, which is a team that can run the ball consistently, they would be a legitimate threat to go the distance because the defense IS that good. But they don't have anything reliable to go to on offense.