Year In Review: The 2010 Falcons Defense

Back in the annals of history, I previewed the 2010 defense and believed that we would improve in just about all aspects of defense. While I believe I was pretty spot-on about the defense as a whole, I made some surprise predictions that, in truth, I missed by a long shot.

Let's recap the predictions and what happened after the jump!

I made three surprise predictions, one for each group of the defense. Let's take a look at those surprise predictions.

Jamaal Anderson gets more than one sack this year. You heard me right.

Weatherspoon will be DROY if he's starting by week 4.

The pass defense will be better than the run defense because of the DBs.

I nailed the first one, though it took a rather heroic effort against the Seahawks for me to land that one safely. JA98 did, indeed, have more than one sack. He had two.

Spoon let me down hard. The team decided to start him from the very beginning over Stephen Nicholas (which I never really agreed with) and, while he looked good pre-injury, he just wasn't what we expected all year long. That and Ndamukong Suh is an animal.

The last one was as much of a reach as JA98's two sacks, and I was also let down. Had I said "The pass defense will be more improved than the run defense this year" then I might've been more on the money.

Still, .333 is Hall of Fame numbers in baseball, so we're going to go with that.

I made a few other predictions throughout the article. I predicted Abe would break 10 sacks, which he did.

I also predicted Biermann would break 10 sacks, which he then used as leverage against us to come nowhere close to 10.

I predicted that Grimes, Owens, and Dunta would all pick a few INTs each, which Dunta laughed at me about until Week 17. Grimes had a fantastic season, plucking his share of INTs and Chris Owens was nowhere to be found for most of the year.

I made various other little silly predictions, most of which were pretty off base, but I think the defense played better than I expected them to, except for the lapse into the "It's 3rd-and-15, how will we give up a 20 yard play this time?" of 2009 towards the end, there.

In your opinion, did the defense play up to your expectations? Why or why not?