I have been laid up since I had surgery last Wednesday. Nothing to serious, repaired nerve damage from a hernia surgery I had a couple years ago. That made for a percocet induced mini-vaca on my couch. So what do you do on Monday when you have to go back to work?....that's right, call in and re-watch the greatness that was Sunday.  Fair warning, this choppy. It's a lot of thought, but not organized very well, see above mention of percocet. I also want to thank the other posts we've had, they have accurately sumized the game and feelings. I won't get into how great I think they did as a whole, great team effort.

I decided to watch the Lions game by watching EVERY player on EVERY play.  Good news for me, you can't really do that. But you do get to see exactly what the line does on every play. SO I watched hoping to answer some questions.

What's up with the run game? Why it works, and why it does not work?

The D-line, who is doing what?

I watched the Lions and Eagles games this detailed, I have no other basis of comparison for my judgements. I never really   watched games last year so I can not say whether or not we are improved from last year.  I had a blast watching the game that analytically, I suggest everyone give it a shot if it intrest you. I learned more than I expected just by watching watch what every player did on any particular play.

A few things that I noticed along the way.

• There Is holding on every play
• Heath Evans is an upgrade. He is a big reason our run game is improved. Mike Bell follows his blocks well. On several plays his is the misdirection that allows plays to develop. He is also in everybody's ear, I don't know if it's good or bad, but he is always talking to the guy who just made the play.
• Reggie Bush did a good job of picking up blitzes, on several occasions. Oh and the Eagles blitzes are WICKED.
• We don't pull our guard near as often as Philly.
• The offensive line looks good, even with Brown out.  Everybody got beat once or twice. No one person stood out as a weakness and got beat repeatedely. I can say that I thought our Guards played really well. Goodwin seems to always have some help. I'm guessing that comes with being the center though.
• Reggie hesitates to hit the whole when it appears to be blocked. Can't really blame him for that, but when Bell runs, he just follows even when it looks clogged, and the blocks seem to open up once he is there. Bell also helps them open up more by breaking arm tackles of lineman. that seems to be a bit of a difference between the two.
• Reggie's between the tackles TD. It was designed to go right, I believe. The way that the TE, 85, blocked it didn't appear to be a designed cut back. I argued with my brother whether or not he would have had a TD if would have just followed Evans block.
• Reggie's punt return was garbage. Plain and simple. He started to go backwards when the defender was like 12 yards in front of him. I was really big on Reggie getting as many touches on kick returns as he could, but a couple muffed punts, mediocre returns, mixed in with the one backwards return. Not going so well at the beginning of the year.
• Just realized there is a lot of Reggie hating going on up there. Another important question was how much do the reactions of the other teams players depend on Reggie. And the answer is a lot. A number of plays involved Drew reading who bites on Reggie. Shockey got some catches because of it. Reggie also did  good job of picking up blitzes, not just chipping at them, but actually stopping them all together.

Defense - I was interested to see, what kind of fomations we used, what personnel, and how much blitzing.

• Anthhony Hargrove is awesome. I noticed things tend to have a ripple effect on the line. Rarely does just one peson make a play. It takes someone starting to  force the offense out of position, then someone else capitalizes on it. Hargrove starts the ripple a lot.
• Grant and Smith are the opposite of ripple makers. At least in the two games. I was waiting to see wha they did and it's not a whole lot. Not NEAR enough to be considered compensated fairly.
• Seddrick Ellis is almost always double-teamed. He still manages to be a force though. He is rarely flat out beaten.
• Shanle played better than Fujita.
• Randall Gay was at the root cause for secondary woes, what little there were. I hope Jenkins' speacial teams play helps get him some playing time.
• Bobby McRay is fast, he goes so fast, he blows by the QB most of the time
• Will Smith has this spin move that runs right into Sedrick Ellis most of the time. pretty funny, pretty ineffective.
• Really cool to watch some of our blitzes. sometimes we dive all four linemen into the middle of the pocket and that make sit easier for outside rusher to get to QB.