It'd be interesting (and I'm not asking you to do it, my friend) to see what those stats looked like, game-to-game, throughout the '23 seaon.

Preseason I looked for our young D players to get shellacked, make rookie mistakes, and through the seaon to learn, improve, gel more as a unit.And that's what I saw as the season played out.

I think stats that average or compile the season's results don't reveal that trend upward. Young was a ifferent player in the last four or five games than he was in the first few. And Kobie? Jones stepped right up coming out of a year playing beside Bobby Wagner, and continued t grow as the season went on. The secondary (such as it was) began to take hold about mid-season.

You can't srgue with the numbers, but my sense is that you have to temper them with other factor - in this case, trajectory. THe defense that ended our season is not the one that started it.