If 100,000 passionate football fans who have been playing, watching, coaching, and conversing about football for their entire adult lives all said that dropping 8, all the time, and waiting for the other team to make an error was a bad way to run a defense, could it be that the masses could see something that you could not from your vantage point.
Maybe you should reevaluate your actions and what they are really telling your employees. You told them something, was it the message that you wanted to send, and are the reactions going to the the result that you are looking for?