Written By Jon Beason
November 20, 2008
Matt Ryan has established himself as a polished quarterback, a guy with a lot of heart, a lot of guts, and you can see he has all the intangibles. I’m fairly impressed with how far he’s come along since college.
In college, I was not a fan.
When I was at Miami and he was at BC, we rattled him that day, our front four put on the pressure and it really got to him. I got a sack on him and we beat them, though we didn’t kill them. I think it was 17-14.
We know going into the game their offense is based on how well they run the ball with Michael Turner. If they can run it, it opens up the field for Ryan and Roddy White to throw the ball downfield. We have to do all we can to make their offense one-dimensional.
Statistically, we do better against the big-name backs. It’s been the rookies and guys who don’t have that mystique that have done well against us. With a big back like Turner, I find the best way to stop pressure is to meet it with equal or more pressure. You’ve got to hit a big back hard, and know that the calvary’s on the way. We have to gang-tackle and swarm.
At 8-2, I can start to admit that we have a pretty good shot at getting to the playoffs at this point. Ten is still the magic number, though. You can’t sit back and hope and wait until you get into the playoffs, you have to take care of your own business and make sure you get in the playoffs.
We didn’t play too great on defense against Detroit. Everybody’s getting on our offense, but anytime you put up 31 points and have a positive takeaway percentile, I’m fine with that. On defense I thought we played down to what we thought would be the level of competition, and to our surprise they’re a talented group. They kept coming after us.
It’s important that we keep winning, because home-field advantage would be huge for us. We’re 6-0 at home, 8-0 including the preseason, and we feel confident that if a team comes into the Panthers Den, our 12th man will really help us out.
Carolina Panthers starting middle linebacker Jon Beason writes a blog for playerpress.com at www.jonbeason.com.