Green Bay Packers focus on taking down Big Ben
Green Bay Packers defensive coordinator, Dom Capers put together a video from the regular season which showed how teams have tried to take down Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger. At 6 ft 5 in, Big Ben isn’t easy to take down even when the
defence breaks through to get to him.
“A lot of guys are going for his pump fakes or not wrapping up fully when they have him,” Green Bay’s linebacker Desmond Bishop said after watching the video. “It's just a mental or a subliminal note that when you get your opportunity to get him, you got
to hit, you got to wrap up and bring all your technique and all your weight with you, because he's definitely a big guy to bring down.”
He has the ability to break away when the defence tries to sack him and it has served him well. In the regular season Ben was sacked 32 times; that’s an average of two sacks per game. In the postseason the Steelers faced two of the toughest defences in the
National Football League (NFL); the Baltimore Ravens and New York Jets. Roethlisberger came out of those games with a total of eight sacks. When the Packers faced the Steelers last year, Ben was sacked five times but that number could have been higher if Ben
hadn’t broken so many tackles.
“We had five sacks, but, man, we could have had him down 10 times. He's tough to tackle,” Green Bay’s defensive end Ryan Pickett said. Pickett added that Roethlisberger was a great quarterback and broke more tackles than any running back he had seen. Whether
or not Ben is better than a running back when it comes to breaking away from tackles is a matter of conjecture, but Pickett is right about missing five opportunities to take down Roethlisberger.
Roethlisberger has been likened to a running back or a lineman by the Packers and that is how they intend to approach him on Sunday. Coach Mike McCarthy said that their focus would be on making sure they take down the quarterback when they get the opportunity.
Green Bay’s linebacker Clay Mathews said, “You see quarterbacks who sometimes go down easily, and you can bring him down. But he's (Ben’s) one of those guys who will fight and gets out of a lot of sacks, and the sacks that he does give up, he's still standing.”
The last time the two teams faced each other, Mathews was able to Sack Ben twice. Mathews said that the defence would have to make sure Ben can’t break tackles and throw game changing passes.
Roethlisberger can’t compare to Michael Vick when it comes to rushing the ball but he does have the ability to rush. Rushing the ball throws the defence off balance. So far in the season Ben has scored a total of three rushing touchdowns, one of them against
the New York Jets in the American Football Conference (AFC) Championship game.
Roethlisberger didn’t really have to run in the regular season because he was well protected in the pocket. He attempted to run the ball just 34 times in 12 games. However, when the Ravens and the Jets challenged the pass, the Steelers quarterback attempted
17 rushes to take the pressure off.
When you go after a quarterback, you have to approach the quarterback carefully and not charge at him with full speed because if a quarterback takes a step to out of the way, the defender could completely miss him. “So you've got to come with some sort of
controlled aggression, once you get to the quarterback,” cornerback Charles Woodson said. “And when you get your hands on him, you can't let go. He's got to go down.”
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