Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Very few of them - no question.
I'm not expecting chicken salad from chicken shit here. But what I'm hoping for is a marginal step up on the talent. He's not going to have 'great players' on balance - he's gonna have a few good ones and he'll have to make due.
But you saw it just as I did - the goddamn Ravens performed so far above their true talent that it was ridiculous. That defense has some solid players, to be sure, but that's not why they were such an excellent unit. They were an excellent unit because they were versatile and played smart team defense.
Spagnuolo over the last decade has demonstrated a pattern of having just awful defenses with a single exception (that '16 team). Sutton's resume over his time in KC is BETTER than Spags over the same time period and that's just a horrifying thought. My point here isn't that Spags needed to be leading perennial top 5 defenses but rather to point out that his track record over that period is arguably the worst of any coach that has been continually employed in a coordinator or higher capacity over the last decade. The problem isn't that he didn't have great defenses - it's that he routinely produced objectively bad ones.
At that level of suck, the excuses just wash out. Maybe he didn't routinely have excellent players but jesus - I'm not going to just assume he routinely had players that awful either. Over an entire decade.
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I don't disagree.
But the Ravens are an interesting example in that their DC was the DC in Denver in 2010 and they were awful. I just don't know how much a DC can do in terms of being so crazy creative without talent.
I think you're also underrating the Ravens talent and I think they're an example of what we need to look at in terms of just having good players everywhere. This great here and shit there approach just doesn't work anymore on defense.