Briggs is the primary offender on James Cooks’ long TD run against the Bills. Rushing up the field like he’s going to make a game winning sack and giving up his entire rush lane. All things considered, the rush defense hasn’t been that bad if you’re allowed to remove the long gains. But we can’t really do that lol. The Cowboys had 4 offensive linemen out. The Buccaneers had both starting tackles out and in order to compensate they moved their center to tackle so essentially playing with 3 backups. I’m not really celebrating any defensive linemen successes this year especially considering the pass rush has disappeared.
Agreed…last two games against backup OL should have been feast days for our DL and these backup OL handled our DL just fucking fine…it’s pathetic. I don’t know what happened to McD but he’s been invisible for the last 2 or 3 games now…I get there is nothing on the other side of him (Clemons is terrible) but a bonafide Edge rusher should be able to get some regardless, and he’s not getting it done. Our DL flat out sucks. There is A LOT wrong with our Defense but I think it does always start up front…if you can’t disrupt the QB there is no secondary in the league that will hold up. Yes it’s a virtuous cycle and sometimes good coverage helps the DL with another second to get to the QB, but more often it’s the other way around…a good DL will help the secondary. We don’t have a good DL. And it’s impacting the entire D. This coaching staff is not helping though…whatever schemes they are running are not elevating the team…
That’s what McDonald was last year too. He’s a nice situation speed rusher in the mold of Yannick Ngakoue, Shaq Barrett, Leonard Floyd, etc. He will probably bounce around the league on 1-2 year deals worth $10-15 million like all those guys do because he’s streaky and you want to avoid having him in there on running downs if you can help it.
Lack of talent - IMO there a no more than a couple of players on this team that would make a good team's roster. mind they haven't really invested in the DL like they used to - I still recall that run of drafts in the early to mid 2010s where they used first round draft pics for 4 out of 5 years in a row on defensive line players (Wilkerson, Coples, Richardson & Williams).
Fair enough, but still, Kinlaw and Thomas were nothing to celebrate either. The point is that the defensive roster is basically like last years, which did a lot better under Ulbrich, and WAY better under Saleh and Ulbrich together. I bet no one here predicted that with this roster and AG and Wilks as coaches we would be #31 with over 30 point allowed. So I don't want to move the goal posts now. The defense grossly underperformed the expectations from this roster. I am not so sure the solution is to majorly change this roster. I believe coaching has A LOT to do with the issues, more so than the roster, much more.
