re: Kudos to Jeff Grimes

No fan of Grimes here. Not by a long shot.

Let me pose a couple of questions:

- why after some necessary shuffling does the line appear better? Why wasn't that the lineup to begin with?

- Charles was struggling at G. Pretty bad. It was obvious. If he has this natural ability at OT, when he's struggling at OG, and the other OTs are struggling... why wasn't it identified earlier?

- did they really pass block better? On the series where we were behind by 2 and ended up punting we had 2 sacks and 2 pressures on 5 pass plays. With the game on the line, after the awesome Chark punt return. That was a let down actually.

- we had 6 'QB affected' pressures. On 24 passes. 1 in every 4. Same ratio as past games (except MSU which was less than 1:4). Those are not good numbers.

- RBs avg'd slightly more than 3.1 YPC. Our 'normal' run blocking is still below par. Was there really an improvement?

I get what you're saying, to get the W and have the same stats against a better D logic dictates they did better. Frankly, I do see improvement. Still a long way to go. But they did not jump a level.

I would give more credit to Canada for timely attacks on weaknesses and using misdirection to make up for OL deficiencies before giving too much credit to Grimes and the OL.

I will point out that we started using the RBs more in protection instead of in routes. That's a catch-22; but hell, Etling was not seeing them anyway so why the hell not. But if we're putting into the context of 'against a better D' then we have to account for taking a route away to help.