The results have been very dodgy.

Now, many will say, "But the offense stinks."

True. But not enough to explain the problem. Think of all the games when the defense has been porous from the first drive. And the games when we had leads but the D collapsed.

Now here's the thing about these season-wide stats. The standard deviation is enormously wide. We aren't a middle of the pack unit from week to week. We swing wildly from elite-level performances to sorry collapses. Remember the 2 weeks of astonishing, shut-out performances followed by the Giants debacle? (Was it the Giants? It was somebody lame.)

The brilliant performances are the basis of the widespread assumption that we have a great defense.

The collapses account for the mediocre overall stats.

Now, here's my thing. A defensive unit that plays as well as ours does maybe 40% of the time should NOT play so badly another 40% of the time. You can't do as well as we often do without top-level talent. We really have superb talent, albeit with question marks this year in the LBs and DBs. But we follow inspiring peak performances with soul-crushing valleys of laziness.

And, in my humble opinion, that sort of competitive inconsistency--in American football--always lies at the door of the coaching staff. Following those 2 weeks of sublime shutouts with the Giants fiasco--a failure that began in the 1st quarter and never got better--is for me an indictment of the coaching staff's game plan, its ability to prepare the team, and its command of its competitiveness during the game.

We have an elite level of talent on our defense, guys who regularly turn in superb performances and a unit that sporadically achieves sublimity.

But it just as frequently lies down and dies. Which is the reason for the mediocre overall stats. And I blame Fisher and Williams for that.