Michael Ash discusses expectations, Derrick Johnson and thanksgiving...

[Coogs]

Originally Posted by milkman

I've talked about this a number of times in the past, Coogs.

In school, watching Albert, I saw a kid with some of the quickest feet I'd ever seen.

In Eugene Monroe's second or third start after taking over for for D'Brickashaw Fergurson, he was beaten around the corner by the RDE and Albert, who was doubling down on the DT saw it, and quickly and fluidly glided back and knocked the DE on his ass.

In space he was as graceful and smooth as anyone I'd seen.

In watching the combines, he and Ryan Clady were far more fluid than any of the O-Linemen.

The problem is, when you drop 25 lbs in a short time, you become a little awkward, being unused to moving that substantially lesser weight around.

Add to the fact that he was concentrating more on techniqe, and he became easier to push.

Then you also have the fact that he was learning a new scheme, then had a another new scheme thrown at him in just a month's time, and he has been/is thinking more than simply playing.

Go back and look at the threads about Albert since the preseason.

In those threads, I talked about how those issues would lead to him struggling, and that he would probably struggle mightily until after the bye week at the least, but we would start to see improvement as the season progressed around the 7th or 8th game.

If you've watched closely, then you would see, in the last two games, he's shown progress, and his struggles aren't nearly as glaring.

As the season progresses, he'll continue to progress.

Fair enough. I have not watched any of the games that closely this season except for the Steelers one. One game day, I find myself watching "the ball", and just enjoying the game. I had some time yesterday, so I went back through all the offensive plays, and a few of the defensive plays, just to watch the lines.

Early on, it looked like the right side of the line was actually better than the right side of the line... right up to the sack O'Callaghan gave up right before half. He struggled in pass protection from that point on. He did well in the run game though. Smith was pretty good all game long in both pass/run situations. The left side and the C had their moments both good and bad all game long.

When the whole line did their job, Cassel actually looked pretty good. I'm just not good enough to know what we need to actually fix the group to be good every play.