Look at the late season runs made in recent years by the Steelers, Giants, and Packers when they won the Super Bowl. All of them began their seasons beating themselves like we've been doing these first couple of games. The talent is there, we just have to put it altogether.
That's the thing though. We haven't shown the ability to put it all together before and it goes back to last season. Granted Cutler went down, but the Minnesota, Washington, Philadelphia and St. Louis games were the same shit. And we also had the Dallas, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Green Bay games that made us look like contenders.
I believe this team has the talent to go on a roll like that, but they also have the lack of discipline that says 8-8 (see: Dallas Cowboys the last 5 or so years).
It all comes down to how well we can execute in key situations. We blew the Panthers out of the stadium for 2 quartets and then promptly let them back in.
Rosario false start on 2nd and 1, Marty drops a 3rd down first down pass, Gould misses a field goal, defenses lets them go down for a score before the half.
Then Jay turns it over, Panthers tie it up, Forte turns it over, Panthers take the lead, Jay gets sacked to end the game.
When we make mistakes we make them in succession. It snowballs. And when we do things well like the 21 unanswered points it's the same thing. We can't keep having these roller coaster momentum swings. Someone has to stop the bleeding when a mistake happens and we also can't get to full of ourselves when we get rolling.
Right now, we need to focus on playing solid, consistent football and forget going for the spectacular.
We also need to find an identity and I don't think the identity is relying on our defense to set up the offense off turnovers.