I believe there is supposed to be a "D" in DEFENSE

There is a recurring theme I see is on the Cowboys defense this season.

Aside from an overall lack of talent and depth most of the players genuinely don’t seem like they know what they are supposed to be doing on the field????

You get a player like Orlando Scandrick that is money playing man coverage in the slot, but put out on an island as the starting CB half the time he appeared to not know where he was supposed to be on the field and who he was supposed to cover. Taking your DB’s and playing them in what they call "quarters" is not working. Unless you are getting a pass rush, it just leaves too many holes. Given time a WR can run out of the ¼ of the field covered by 1 DB and run into the area covered by another one, but the DB’s don’t seem to understand where they should be and who they should cover when that happens. Heaven forbid you put 2 WR’s in the same 1/4, all hell breaks loose!! I am not even sure Dave Campo the Secondary coach understands it because he has certainly been unsuccessful getting the players to execute it properly.

Wade and Jerry have really messed this Defense up!

Let’s start with the personnel decisions: You lose Canty, Henry, Ellis, Williams, Jones , Johnson, Thomas, and Burnett. In today’s NFL basically any player that plays on the base or nickel defense is a starter so we lost effectively 8 starters:

1. Starting with the sheer amazement that we have no depth at LB for a defensive system that is centered around the LB position? This is unacceptable. I undetsand that getting Brooking for Thomas is a fair trade off, and it was probably time to allow for Spencer to take over as a starter. The real problem is there is no depth, it used to be when Ellis went out, and you had a fresh beast of a rusher like Spencer coming in, now you basically can’t sub them out at all. In the Nickel Carpenter taking over for Burnett is laughable. If there was a spot for a nickel LB in the Pro Bowl Burnett would have been that player. To replace him with Barbie Carpenter has been a huge liability.
2. As for the DB’s we went from having more depth at DB’s then we knew what to do with, to not even being sure if we had a player worthy of starting. As I mentioned earlier I think our DB problem is the system as much as it is the talent, but this CB experiment between Jenkins and Scandrick is deplorable. A head coach needs to be able to make a decision. The CB position is all about confidence and not naming a starter doesn’t give your young DB’s much confidence, and it actually makes the entire defense less confident.
3. On the DL, I always said we will see how much we miss Canty based on the production of Ware and so far he has zero sacks, so I would say we miss him quite substantially. I can understand losing Canty, but we made little effort to bring in adequate depth. We released Tank Johnson who was basically costing us nothing, and brought in Igor who I think is OK, but the numbers speak for themselves so far….

In addition to personnel and systems issues, lastly I must lament about the situational defensive decisions:

1. In the first game against the Bucs their QB (Leftwich) is considered sack-prone so we blitzed heavy and got burned in the running game. Wade did a good job in that game slowing down the attack and just sitting in the base defense and that was good enough to win that game. Well he built on that experience and decided to focus on stopping the run, and just playing the defense. Wrong decision! You are playing a much better team, with a QB that if you say we are going to sit back and make him have to beat you, he will beat you. Instead of giving up on the blitz packages, he should have spent the week focused on ensuring that when they blitz that they still have gap responsibility, that way if they run you are standing right in the running lane to make the play. You don’t give up you teach them to do it right.
2. The other is decisions like the one to go into a PREVENT defense with 3 minutes left in the game with the opponent only needing a FG to win the game. I love Wade’s comment, you have a series where you have 7 guys in coverage and 3 guys going out for passes you expect your players to make the plays to win that battle. Using conventional wisdom this makes perfect sense. Problem is this has never proven to be true, the PREVENT defense has only served to PREVENT teams from winning the game. It’s one thing to run it with under a minute and the other teams needs a TD but this was hardly the appropriate situation. Even our nickel defense is suspect, the PREVENT defense is completely useless…….