After seeing what our offense did to the Steelers defense, one thing is extremely clear to me, you have to maintain the threat of the run, and Derrick Henry is a force multiplier.
The Steelers keyed in on Lamar’s legs the whole game, they played the run, but always had eyes on Lamar and refused to let him run, Henry went off because of this. Any defense we face, we have to know that they’re going to play the run, and whether they key Lamar or Henry, we have to be ready to make them pay. If/when we face the chiefs, we have to have Henry on the field, they will key in on the run, we have to force this defensive philosophy, we have to make them key in on Henry rather than Lamar, and then we have to run play action off of that.
If we want to beat the chiefs, we need the defense to be resilient the same way they were against the Steelers, and we need to force the chiefs to overplay Henry. If we can do that, we have an actual chance. If we abandon the RBs again, against that defense, we will not have a chance in hell. The OL won’t hold up, the pass game will struggle against that chiefs defense, Derrick Henry is the neutralizer, whether he’s breaking runs or not, we have to COMMIT. We have to be varied in our ground attack with Henry, and we have to pass the ball with Henry in the backfield.
I’ve been saying it all year, justice hill has been excellent on third down, but if you want to be able to consistently move the chains against an elite defensive front which we have struggled to do, you’re gonna need Henry’s presence. You gotta trigger downhill and get Henry in the backfield if you don’t want him to take over the game, we have guys who can absolutely kill on a well executed play action, we HAVE to establish that and use it frequently.
I just have not seen nearly as much of that as I expected to see this season, and I feel like we saw a good bit of it on Saturday and it worked incredibly well. It needs to be a focal point