Rex Ryan surprisingly named Vernon Gholston starter at outside linebacker when Calvin Pace is suspended
"With that, we talked about Vernon and how he's going to have to step up and how we expect him to make great strides this year and how he was going to be a big reason in our successes moving forward. He's just got a roll with it now where he's going to be a starter. We'll see how he does. ..."The plan is that we're going to play the best 11 and if that means a guy is going to change a position then he'll change a position. This is a deep football team so we're going to play all of our guys. Some guys will have maybe more of a role on first down or maybe more of a role on third down. But we're going to use everything that we got. We're building a football team. And we don't have to play the same 11 guys. This is all about what's best for our football team, putting our guys in situations to be successful. Again, we look forward to getting Calvin back. But that's certainly not going to be an excuse for us."
I read more into the second paragraph than the first. Naming Gholston the starter this early shows Rex's confidence in his ability to coach up Gholston. It doesn't mean he's guaranteed to see the majority of the snaps. Vernon might look great right now, but he's got to show something during camp and preseason to lock down a spot. If Marques Murrell and/or Jason Trusnik badly outplays him, I imagine this decision gets reversed before Week 1.