Sometimes injuries can be a good thing. Sometimes they can force you out of your comfort zone and force you into tapping into your creativity. Ingenuity is born of necessity. Once, this defense was predicated on being corner-centric. And at that time, it made sense to be. We didn't just have a couple horses out there, we a couple of thoroughbred stallions. Now? Umm... not so much. But if we are to believe a lot of the camp chatter, our safety unit seems to be teeming with talent. It might make sense to reconfigure some of the core philosophies of the defensive scheme in order to leverage that talent.
I'm not the biggest Rex fan in the world, but I do appreciate his willingness to scrap convention and think outside of the box. I give him a ton of credit for recognizing the unique talent that Revis was and changing the way things were done on the defensive side of the ball. Not unlike the way LT redefined pass rushing, Revis redefined cornering. Nobody has ever spent seasons following around #1 receivers and blanking them before. Nobody. Revis made the art of cornering sexy. Rex made Revis.
Rex saw the talent and devised a scheme to leverage it. Rex did a lot of funky... crazy things knowing he could trust his guy to disallow completions to the opponents' favorite target with little to no help. We all remember the overloads and the havoc that was wreaked across the league in 2009. Rex has shown us all that he knows how to coach to and through his talent.
For a while, I thought he was becoming too rigid in his scheme. He had a press man philosophy and he used his clout to steer the team toward using it. Now... he's being forced out of that scheme. There's no horses to put out there anymore. All he's got is a bunch of donkeys in the cornerback stable. But he might have some horses at safety.
We heard all the chatter about Antonio Allen playing corner today and his two INTs. But I just can't buy the notion of Tony Allen out there in press man, head up on real receivers. That would be like taking a 290 lbs Quinton Coples and sticking out at outside line... anyway... it was just be a bad idea. You know what I'm saying. I would have to imagine that they had him playing in the slot in a nickel package. And that wouldn't really be crazy at all. The slot corner role has a lot of overlap in field view and responsibilities with the safety position. Might even say, when looking over the roster, that it might make some sense to devise a scheme thats a little more safety-centric than corner-centric.
Calvin Pryor, Antonio Allen, Dawan Landry, Rontez Miles, Josh Bush, Jaiquwan Jarret... I'm likin dem names much more than the corner names. And I'm seeing and hearing dem names makin much more plays than the corner names. Maybe it would be somewhat logical to see much more of dem names on field than the corner names.
I've been wanting to see some Big Nickel Base for a few years now. We finally have the horses up front to get after the passer. And we're finally talented enough at safety to shift more of the responsibility their way. We got some dudes that can run and hit back there. Let them share some coverage zones, lets get them in the blitz mix, lets let them make some plays.