Bye, Josh Malone and Hardy Nickerson!

[*rfaulk34*]

(09-01-2019, 07:03 PM)NKURyan Wrote: In a way I think it's actually a really outside-of-the-box, intriguing move. The coaching staff basically looked at their defensive roster, acknowledged the weakness at the linebacker position, and said screw it, let's just run extra guys out there on the line and in the secondary. I think a lot of coaches would've kept some of our bums at the position just because of the old "we have to have X number of linebackers" philosophy, but this... is kind of interesting.

The supposed tradeoff to this is that it leads you more open to being beat by TEs and RBs in short yardage and in the middle of the field but, ummm... that was happening anyways in our standard package and would've continued to happen this year. Might as well concede that point and focus on areas they can actually improve.

I've been excited to see the new offense all offseason, but I'm actually more interested in seeing our defensive approach now too.

Traditional LBers are slowly going out of style. You'd prefer to have a Josh Evans type (who could theoretically cover TEs) but slightly bigger safeties are probably a better option with how offenses are going these days. All it takes is a team or two to do it successfully and then everyone else starts copying it. 

More big, fast Dlinemen that can rush or drop into shallow zone, a couple LBers that can fill gaps/cover and then a bunch of DBs to cover all the WRs and RBs running all over the field.