Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
My thought process is shift to a heavy nickel as your base.
That puts Sorensen down in the box and Thornhill in at FS. It then frees Mathieu up to play rover (as he's been playing about 50% of his snaps as a true FS this season).
It takes Nieman off the field, who's no better than Sorensen in run support, so you're about even there. Meanwhile you've now given Mathieu a little more run to go out there in support and maybe funnel things back to the middle where you at least have a couple of large bodies in Nnadi and Reed/Saunders.
Additionally, with Mathieu out there with a little more freedom, you don't have to sell out quite as badly to defend the flats. He's more capable of reading/reacting than Sorensen is. At that point he doesn't have to commit quite as quickly to still be involved in the play, so you're less prone to misdirection and backs breaking into the pattern late.
And most of all, it's a package you're going to stay in most of the time so they can't catch you mid-change and/or confuse your subs as they're trying to set up.
Essentially what you're doing is converting to a 4-2-5 base defense by swapping Niemann out for Sorensen and thus allowing Mathieu a bit more of a robber role. Is your run defense going to be better? Eh...maybe not...but I think it will be different. I think it will be less confused and I think it will be less susceptible to big plays. I don't think it will be appreciably worse between the tackles.
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Perfectly said.
I didn't come in here to try and 'fix the defense,' at all, was just going to drop a one-liner for fun, but that's pretty much what I've been thinking. DD is a downhill safety, and as such he just plays better in or very near the box. He just isn't that comfortable playing more than 10 yards from the line. Thornhill looks healthy to me, so drop Sorenson in the box to help defend a flat and clean up vs. run plays, and get Thorny back on the field full-time already. Then HB can hunt, which is what the secondary is designed around in the first place.
The Jones thing is probably going to revert back to him mostly being inside anyway pretty soon, so I don't have anything to say about that.
But the sub-package issue has been glaringly bad so far. They need to probably go big nickel or some damn thing and make things simpler for these new guys. Every team has keyed on this problem and making the defense look a lot worse than it really is. I mean it's really bad when Jalen hurts and the mediocre Eagles can effectively take advantage of our communication issues.
I think Spags will address it this week, but it could get ugly for the defense anyway.