The most important part is we have TWO better guys than they do in Pile High

Yes , he took the top off the defense. Colts were forced to play the whole field.

That's a great question.

And you could see that difference when Smith was in the game. When Smith was in....there was less running room because the defense knew that he wasn't going deep. He gets knocked out....and all of a sudden the defense has to respect Foles to Hill.

Smith went deep twice in the first series.

I think the gameplan called for attacking a weak Colts secondary. And just last week Smith went deep to Hill despite Hill not having space when the ball was thrown so it's hard to say that teams wouldn't respect the potential of a downfield throw to Hill.

I just don't see any reason to believe that Smith wouldn't have tried those passes or had the exact same results. The first ball was poorly thrown and the second was a layup.

That deep ball to Hill looked like a punt. It was a lucky reception against a horrible defense. He calmed down after that. His rocket cannon he calls an arm gets me hard, but there was room for improvement for Foles yesterday. Knocking the dust off will probably only improve him.

The Broncos, IMO. The Raiders. Teams that can get pressure while sending 4.

Those are the kinds of tight, tough games where your QB needs to have great situational awareness, be careful with the football and know where/when the smallest of holes will open up for them.

Against those caliber defenses, you're not going to score 28 so you have to know how to get to 17 intelligently and without doing anything to make it harder on your defense in the process.

Foles is going to have better games against bad defenses than Smith would because those are in his wheelhouse. If he has time and there is a lot of space to work with, he'll attack (as is his preference) and he'll shred teams. But if the time and space isn't there....he's going to attack anyway and get us burned pretty badly. And having less mobility than Smith will hurt us as well.

When has Smith shown that mobility this year though?

And I get what you're saying about Smith....but to me...he hasn't looked the same this year.

Smith 0-4 throwing deeper than 15 yds

I think his longest completion was 13 yds

Smiths accuracy on deep balls hasn't been good. There's no reason to believe the exact same results would be there. They both bring different things to the table. Just a matter of even looking downfield...it seems lIke alex is going so fast through progressions he hits the most safe pass more...which can be a good thing.

Lots of talk about how horrible the Indy defense is and it being a major reason that Foles played as well as he did. Yet, no discussion on how horrible the Saints defense is in comparison to Smith's play in that game.

Yup, but his downfield accuracy has been somewhat better the last 3 weeks. I think Alex is starting to trend down. This could be the beginning of his decline.

I have been a little surprised at some of the throws that Alex has attempted in the past couple weeks. Throws that I would never have thought he would have even attempted in the past. Yes, most have been incomplete, but he was attempting them.

Excellent post.

Keep winning, however you have to do it.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Jeremy Maclin had some really nice words for Foles after the game. <a href="https://t.co/r4AC0Ef7II">pic.twitter.com/r4AC0Ef7II</a></p>&mdash; Pete Sweeney (@pgsween) <a href="https://twitter.com/pgsween/status/792870319845351424">October 30, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>