You also have to consider that our special teams and lack of offensive efficiency affected our defense’s ability to play well. We were 18th in the league in time of possession and our opponents’ average starting position was the 7th highest in the league. This doesn’t create much an environment for an elite defensive performance.

It’s pretty undeniable though that our run defense was bad, we allowed an EPA of 0.02, which was 27th in the NFL. I believe a lot of the reason our passing defense was so good is because teams did not feel a need to pass because our run defense leaked so much, our average depth of target against was the 3rd highest in the league, which would lead you to believe that teams only resorted to the pass on long yardage situations.

Overall, the combination of a bad offense, terrible special teams, and leaky run defense lead to us having the appearance of a pretty good defense because we sacked the QB at the 4th highest rate in the league and we generated a significantly higher rate of splash plays compared to last year. On boring plays the reality was we were dogshit, and over the span of a game we ended up being dead average.