What a frustrating season!
The Good:
Chris Williams. (and the guys who blocked on all those returns, of course)
Luca Congi. (Crazy Good this year)
Special Teams in general were pretty good until we inexplicably took about 100 holding penalties in the last three weeks on returns????
The Offence:
The brilliance that this team showed from time to time on offence was unprecedented in my 40+ years as a Tiger-Cat fan.
The Bad:
The Offence:
Although this was the best offence I've seen as a Cat fan, I'm sure we also set a record for most punts after getting within field goal range, by backing ourselves up with an unnecessary penalty or a really strange play call.
And we seemed to always find a way to self destruct on offence at exactly the wrong time. If you review the films of the games you'll find many situations where we had a 7-10 point lead, were driving to put the dagger in and start the rout, and... bad turnover (hank forces a pass into triple coverage in the red zone - pick six!/Fantuz or Grant or Giguerre fumbles carrying the ball like a loaf of bread at the 10 yard line.) Momentum changes, the opposition closes the gap and never looks back.
The Defense:
Awful, as a whole. All season. Worst pass rush I've seen in a very, very long time. I really think that the injury to Knowlton hurt badly, and later Johnson when Markeith came back. But I also think we were slow to make changes in the secondary (get Webb in at Safety in place of Bucknor who was overmatched). I actually thought our secondary looked better with Tisdale, Webb, Colclough than it did early on. But we still need help there for sure.
At the end of the day, the defense gave up way too many points regularly to win, but the offence has a share in this too, I think, in spite of the crazy numbers they put up.
I saw an interview with Roethlisberger when his team was 2-3, and he was asked about the fact that he had led them to a fourth quarter lead in each of the games they lost only to see the defense let it evaporate. His answer was that the offence had a chance in the fourth quarter of each game to put the game out of reach and they didn't execute. He said 'it was on him" to not put the defense in that position. I think that he could just as easily have been talking about the Ticats season.