The run defense has been up and down to say the least, but they have played much better as of late. Last week against Larry Johnson and the Chiefs, a team they gave up over 200 yards on the ground to in Week4, the Broncos were able to hold to just 83 yards on the ground. The problem has been the BIG play. The Broncos can play great defense against the run 9 plays in a row, then give up a 40 yard TD. That has been the struggle.

As for Hillis, it is definitely a blow. He brought a level of physicality to the running game that had been missing. Tatum Bell will likley get alot of work, along with Cory Boyd, who played at N.C. State. Keep an eye on him as well.

Thanks to ABF for chiming in as well.

Cory Boyd was promoted from the practice squad this week, where he has been since getting cut from Tampa Bay’s PS earlier in the season. To say that he may be raw would be an understatement.

But so far this season, whether we are talking about undrafted free agent rookie RBs, RBs coming off of major injuries, FBs playing TB, or LBs playing FB, our guys always seem to come out prepared to paly and do their part, and the reason for that is Bobby Turner, perhaps the best RBs coach in the business. He has been scouting, training and preparing denver RBs for years, and I think his body of work speaks for itself.

That said, there is a limit to what even the greats can accomplish. Tatum Bell and Boyd will be the 7th and 8th running backs, respectively, to have lined up in the Denver backfield this year, and most broncos fans have their hopes pretty well grounded. We mostly jsut hope that our running game is respectable enough to keep you guys from teeing off on Cutler, and anything more than that should go along ways towards helping the war effort.

Tampa probably played the Broncos the toughest, though Jay Cutler, when he is patient and not trying to force the ball downfield can carve up any defense. That is the big if, however. Cutler can fall into a bad habit of trying for the big play every play. He did it against Oakland and it cost him. The last two weeks, against the Jets and Chiefs, he was patient, let the game come to him, and he has had two great games.

Again, I appreciate ABF answering this one as well. He is right in alot he says.

What Cutler can do is make the first guy miss, something the is pivotal to the quarterback position in the NFL. The O-Line has done a magnificent job, but when teams have sold out on the blitz, Cutler has been able to sidestep the pressure and deliver the football.

If you ask Cutler, he’ll tell youo he prefers to throw the ball downfield. He might have the strongest arm in the NFL. He is more efficient and effective with the short-to-intermediate passing game, which is the bread and butter of the Shanahan WCO.

Peppers has been moving around the line a bit to take advantage of better match-ups. How would the rest your O-line handle Peppers?

The Broncos like to play man, but their pass rush just hasn’t been good enough to allow it. Dre Bly hears it a lot from the fans, but the coaches are generally pleased with him and think that he gets victimized due to a) no pas rush and lots of time for QBs to throw b) nobody’s going to throw at Champ and c) the safety help has just been abysmal. Really, really bad safeties, although the rookie Josh Barrett had a very nice game against Tony Gonzales last Sunday.

As for the Deion comment, um, Champ is an absolute monster in run support. If you look at the 2006 season, when the consensus is that he was thrown at no more than 60 times all year, he had 86 tackles. You can probably find a video clip from September in which he hits Larry Johnson low, wraps him up, flips him over and pops the ball out. Dude is a monster in run support, and it’s totally unappreciated.

And just to reiterate the Champ Bailey point, Bailey is the Anti-Deion Sanders when it comes to run support and tackling in general. Champ is one of the better pure tacklers in the league to be sure.

I’d take Champ every day and twice on Sunday. Even with the amount of injuries we’ve had to running backs this year, we’ve still managed to get at least adequate production. Before he got hurt, Champ was one of the few bright spots on an otherwise bad defense. His ability to completely shut down one side of the field cannot be underrated. I think he’s only been thrown at something like 12 times all season, and one of those he picked off. Plus, who’s to say that Portis wouldn’t have been injured as well.

I’ll defer it to the Guru, but a fan favorite is definitely our DE Elvis Dumervil (aka Doom). He injured his hand this preseason, and that has probably been part of the reason that he has had an off season, but he was awesome last season (12.5 sacks) and he has been getting better this season (he had a sack last game). He may be a small guy, but he has a very good bull-rush that tends to surprise OTs, and he uses that to set up his outside speed rush.

This isn’t a slight on your defense, but the Bronco’s passing game is very hard to defeat, and the best option is to force it to beat itself. There are so many threats, that even the best defenses in the league don’t have the depth to cover them all. Our top three tight ends can all catch with the best of them; a major requirement for being a Broncos FB is the ability to catch; and that’s not even considering our depth at WR. Brandon Marshall is one of the best young wide receivers in the game, Eddie Royal would probably be considered for ROY honors if it weren’t for Matt Ryan, and Brandon Stokley is probably the best slot reciever in the game.

With so many options, your best bet is to cover the deep routes and make us dink-and-dunk our way down the field. Pressure doesn’t really work, because we have one of the best (if not the best) pass protecting offensive lines in football, as well as the best blocking TE in football (Daniel Graham). Also, Jay Cutler has a knack for avoiding pressure when someone does get beat – which is a large reason why he has only been sacked 6 times all year, plus the weird statistical sack due to his fumble in the SD game.

The only times this season when our offense has struggled have been when we either made stupid mistakes (mainly bad turnovers) or when we tried to throw deep into coverage. The best example of that was the recent game against Oakland. Many of our passes were to outside deep routes into coverage, and as a result many of them were incomplete, and we had one of our worst offensive games of the year.

The Panthers would be better off playing a deep Cover 2 type scheme, with both safeties over the top and playing mid to deep zones with the corners and linebackers. This would force us to throw underneath passes, and make us sustain long drives. We have a lot of 10+ play scoring drives this season, so we are pretty good at moving the chains, but Jay has also shown a tendency to try to force balls and sooner or later one is going to get intercepted. Also, making us sustain drives would shorten the game, further favoring the Panthers. With Hillis out, the running game won’t be as much of a factor, and I’m sure that your LB will be able to contain what little we are able to bring to the table.

As Ive been telling my friends who are Panthers fans, the most important key is to win the TO battle. If you win the TO battle, you win going away, otherwise it will probably be a close game, which I think favors the Broncos (six of our eight wins are by a touchdown or less).

1) Play cover 2 with lots of guys zoning and be patient. If you keep the deep stuff covered long enough Jay will try a deep pass anyway and give your guys a great chance for a turnover.

2) Get an early lead…that also seems to get our young guys flustered a bit, though they handled that well against KC last week.

Most of us Bronco fans are VERY bummed about Hilis going down…he is really a special RB.

Worried though? I’m not sure about that. Our passing game has been setting up our running game quite a bit this year and our O-line is THE best in football. The running game should be fine.

We’ve managed to get production out of six different starting running backs, so I trust that our O-Line can open up holes big enough to allow at least moderate production by someone else. We should be getting our number 1 guy back soon (Selvin Young), so that will help as well.

This season we have really been testing the adage that you can just throw anyone into a Shanahan offense and he’ll rush for 1000 yds, and so far it seems to be holding up alright. I really wish that Hillis hadn’t gone to IR, as he had started playing like a franchise running back, but he’ll just be that much better next year.

Within his West-Coast Offense, Shanahan has been able to “scheme” a running game out of quick passes and WR screens, so I would trust that we can get enough production to support our deeper passing game.

We’ve historically been a 4-3 team under Shanahan, but our DC has experimented with a 3-4 off and on throughout the season. The last few weeks, however, we’ve definitely settled back to a 4-3, and a couple weeks ago our DC all but said that the 3-4 experiment was over. It is a good concept for us, since we have good depth at LB and DE (even a couple hybrid DE/LB types), the problem was just that we didn’t have a player that could perform as a NT for us. DT is definitely a hole, but the production there has been decent the past few weeks. It will be interesting to see how they hold up against your offensive line, as that will be a big test for them.

Me, Zappa, and Mermaid will take care of him. Don’t worry about that.

I would like to say that this has been another in a string of excellent cross-blogging experiences for us at MHR. For the most part (everyone but Steve) you guys have been insightful, knowledgeable, and respectful. Another truly classy blog that we’ve come across. Really, besides The Phinsider and The Nuclear Wasteland… err, Silver and Black Pride, we’ve had an excellent schedule this year in terms of blogging experiences. Good luck! (Except, not this week, of course.)

He’s never commented over here that I know of. Thanks for being a good sport. Hard to control the trolls sometimes

You just can’t handle the heat that Steve brings, can ya! Boo ya! You’re a lousy.. um, writer? Yeah, a lousy writer. No objectivity, you’re clearly in the tank for the Broncos! You’re a crappy ol’ so-and-so…. you’re a… uh… hmm… umm… yeah.

Yeah, sorry. Just don’t have it in me. Sorry about the trolls that found their way over to the MHR, they don’t generally stake much of a claim around these parts. We try to run them off, lead them gently back to the newspaper sites. I can see CSR resembling MHR in another year or two.

I enjoyed reading the piece, and I dropped some comments on the article. Good stuff. I haven’t have a chance to read the piece on Safeties yet, but I’m looking forward to it.