Good post, JSD ... I was going to say that perhaps the fact that we never scored any points on offense could affect these defensive numbers. Opposing offenses needed to score fewer points on average to win the game, so of course they would be more inclined to go into "conservative" mode earlier. All the things you mentioned are the real measures of a defense, and none of them look great.
Now, I always thought that this kinda had an effect on the defense, too, in that they were always on the field, so the other team had more opportunities to score and wear down the defense. I guess the real point is, again, that football stats are tough to rely on when making player and coach evaluations, because everything is so interconnected. It is a sport that relies a lot more on what we see than what the numbers say. There are too few games to really allow a large enough sample size for the stats to mean a lot, IMO, and the range of potential outcomes is too narrow (i.e. most QB days will fall in between 1-3 TDs, most CBs will have a certain range of INTs, etc) and while it makes it easy to see that Peyton Manning is really better than Mark Sanchez, it doesn't help make those judgments between players who are more equal.
The whole discussion makes me feel like if we can't even agree what the numbers mean, then what is the point of talking about them? Obviously statistical arguments are proving to be unconvincing to everyone here, because it is too easy to construct them for any position you can imagine.
