03-15-2024, 02:54 PM
(03-15-2024, 02:45 PM)Joelist Wrote: This is getting ridiculous. Obviously they are doing a targeted Free Agency and when you look at ALL the stats on the players signed you see they speak to problem areas that bit us big time last season.
Stone speaks specifically to the constant brain dead secondary play (bad angles, out of alignment, miscommunication) that was THE cause of the defensive collapse. We weren't physically beaten by offenses we just had constant communication and alignment issues causing explosive plays. Bell speaks to this also - the IQ and leadership quotients in the secondary room have gone way up in Free Agency.
Rankins directly addresses the interior pass rush we have lacked since Ogunjobi left. We now have a tandem for inside pass rush (Rankins and Hill) instead of Hill and no one else. When we had Hill and Og they gave us 12.5 sacks from the inside.
For all the love Mixon gets (and deserves in many ways), he does have problems in his game at this stage in his career. He is terrible as a pass blocker and has had balance issues (going down to first contact and not making people miss) his whole career - he has never been a hard to tackle back. Moss again directly speaks to these - he IS a good pass protector and IS hard to tackle and DOES gets good YAC.
Even Gesicki speaks to a need for another mismatch slot receiver. Tart when he comes in is an effective NT and continues the rebuild of the IDL into a unit that has capable players in all phases of the rotation and less injury history.
This approach makes a lot more sense than blowing big bag on a name because it is centered on getting players that have ability and are scheme fits and speak to gaps we had.
You’re looking at what the added. What about what they didn’t add?
We lost our starting RT and starting CB with no replacement yet. I don’t think any RT they find will be better than Jonah was, and he wasn’t even that good. Do you not think the O line is important? It’s possible we get a better Cb still.
We couldn’t stop the run last year and we lost at the line of scrimmage. Reader was good at that. We needed to retain him AND add a rushing DT like rankins. We didn’t give one of our best players a new contract extension, Tee.
It’s easy to pinpoint the moves we made and say, hey look we improved in those areas. But did we improve at RT, DT, CB? Is S, RB, TE more important to a teams success than DT, OT and CB?
