whats lost on ozze and harball is that a player's value is his value to the team he played for. for a host of reasons a player cannot be measured by the changing chemistry with another team. so many of our fans say "see...see" "he didn't do as well....Ozze was right!!" Of course those same fans gloss over ozze's replacements.
its tough to pick apart an icon, but hes doing it to himself. long past time.
as far as PFF no comment
The former is a fair point, and you're right in that a player struggling or excelling elsewhere doesn't necessitate the exact same result had they stayed. Unfortunately, there's no alternative other than leaning on a hypothetical, so it's an imperfect indication albeit a usable one. The issue is that Williams, while having scattered plays and sometimes full games of positive flashes, was often burned when it came to his general performance. In 2011, he allowed the 7th most yards with 822. Throughout the whole 2012 campaign, he surrendered 1,118 yards with 7 TDs. So his future struggles were mainly par for the course. We were set to have Lardarius Webb return from missing 14 games, with Corey Graham still in the mix. Defensively, while we allowed more passing TDs in 2013, we gave up virtually the same QB rating from the year before given that our burn percentage of 56.9% was the 3rd best in the league. We also finished 12th in passing yards allowed compared to 16th the year before. Overall, we gave up less yards per game, finishing 12th to 17th, an even lower 3rd down percentage of 34%, 3rd best in the league. We had the same yards per play at 5.2 and virtually the same PPG at 22 to 21.5. By all accounts, we fielded either an equal defense or an even better one than the year before. And there lies the problem.
In discussing breaking up the unit, the point inherently focuses on the departures. Does the added presence of Kruger, Ellerbe, Pollard, Williams and Reed force us back into the SuperBowl? It's arguably as unlikely as something can be. Especially since we'd be subtracting Dumervil and Smith. Those 5 players combined to earn over $35 million in total salaries in their first season elsewhere, so at best, we were going to lose most of them purely for financial reasons. That's without Boldin's $6 million. Additionally, all five held starting roles on a defense that didn't outperform its future counterpart, and while we miserably failed to replace Reed, the rest of the lost production was amended. Meanwhile, the offense lost a single starter to the FA, trades or releases. It was a major and unnecessary loss in Boldin, but otherwise, it retained most of its players. Injuries and poor play derailed the group, torpedoing us into becoming one of the season's most miserable offenses both through the air and on the ground. From a losses standpoint, there's almost no point to be made outside of Boldin. Even then, it's tough to presume that he would've rescued from its the offense by his lonesome. Replacements wise, there's a much better argument to me made, and I eluded to this in my first post. No question there. But as it stands, there's little empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that we would've repeated had we held on to our retainable losses that fell outside of the three retirements of Lewis, Birk and Kemoeatu. It's a tough sell, which is why the point about the break up can fall on deaf ears.
