Quote:
Originally Posted by That Guy
just because you draft someone in the 2nd round doesn't mean they're not garbage.
at corner this year, we had hall (IR), porter (IR) amerson (played like garbage), biggers (garbage), breeland (great, considering), and rotating practice squad players. how the hell do you make a good defense with 1 competent corner.
safety was basically the same. clark (slow/washed up garbage), merriweather (misses 50% of games, gets confused, sometimes plays decently), ihenacho (IR), and the people behind them that didn't show in any way that they could get it done.
so, no one's arguing that the D staff sucked. they're just saying it's not an either/or. the staff sucked AND the players they were given were horrible and WAY below the standard NFL talent level (regardless of where or how we got them, or how good they might have been in college or 3 years ago or whatever).
no one can design a good defense w/ 1 corner and 0.5 of a safety. our defensive staff was set up to fail when we signed two injuries (porter/ihenacho) and a band aid (clark). once hall went down, it was over. haslett's track record has proven he's a 20-27th place defensive coordinator. no one's arguing that. you (HG28) are just being a bit obtuse in not noticing or admitting that while it is true that the staff sucked, it's ALSO true that the talent was truly truly horrible this year.
and we knew that going into last offseason, and the team knew that too, yet they failed to do anything meaningful about it beside hope and pray. F-.
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I agree with most of this as it relates to our talent or lack of it at safety. Other than the short time Sean Taylor and LaRon Landry played together we have not had a good pair of safety's (needed to be a good defense) since we had Brad Edwards, Danny Copeland and Todd Bowles all the way back in 1992. That is a long time ago, which partly explains why we have not had a dominate defense since.
As is repeated over and over again during playoffs, you win (in the playoffs) by 1) good defense 2) running the ball. If you can not do this your chances to advance are lessened.
Our biggest weakness in our defense last season going into 2014 was at safety. But yet we spent most of our available cap money on Orakpo, Hatcher and DJax. Then we drafted a LB at the top of our draft. The huge hole at safety and to a lesser extent O-line has to be a priority to fix. We currently have terrible Safety's.