What does playing vanilla on defense have to do with the d-line getting blown off the ball at times and all the missed tackles?
Part of it could be that when you play a vanilla defense, you might have less gang tackling, and the O-line can be more aggressive if they know where the D will be each time, because there's not much stunting or shifting. I don't think it accounts for all of the leaked yards and such, but the offense has an advantage when the defense is giving a lot of the same looks. I agree that the missed tackles and not dominating the line is cause for some concern, but it's not totally absurd that the vanilla defense had something to do with it.