Here’s Merlin…
Wanted to start a thread for putting things I come across as I look a bit deeper at what they were doing last season. So right out the gate Morris is a very interesting hire because he's the antithesis of Brandon Staley. Brandon ran a brilliant mix of defensive calls (probably the most Quarters or Cover 4 in the league with pre-snap disguising on top of that) that stood out from the rest of the league and dare I say wasn't really figured out until Green Bay in the playoffs. Now we did give up points in key games like for example Buffalo. But that was to my eye at least moreso due to the QB extending plays and making throws that were beyond most QBs' skill level to make, with some poor coverages by the Rams at times mixed in so I'm not sure that it was Staley moreso than the players. Green Bay we got beat by scheme in considerable part. IMO. But that's a different conversation.
Enter Atlanta who (as an antithesis of Staley) ran an extremely low amount of Cover 4. Which was Staley's bread and butter. Which is also our base approach in the secondary in 2020. They basically ran a crap ton of Cover 2 prevent and they ran it poorly. Cover 2 is considered archaic in the NFL for good reason, that being that teams will underneath you all day long and mash the run vs that light front. To run it you do need plus safeties who can get into the box on the fly, and a great MLB doesn't hurt either lol. You also need team tackling and they sure as F didn't have that. Now Jones is one of those MLBs who can go ape in a given game (like he did vs us in the playoffs in '17), but overall he's light in the pants and not a guy with good physicality. Their secondary at large was quite bad, particularly given that they don't have a lot of skill at breaking on the ball it's like watching dudes thinking when you turn on their games.
And now Morris is going to be taking over a defense that has specialized into the back end look that he's probably weakest at. So call me crazy or paranoid or whatever but it seems to me that this is a big deal. I know Morris is an experienced coach and all that and I readily admit he was dealing with some serious weaknesses (their DL was crap, their secondary was too, pretty much everyone but Jarrett played like crap. But man am I paranoid about this hire.
Gonna link a PFF article next which I do think might have been linked before, but this is a slow period pre-camp so maybe some will want to pick through it. I find it really helpful in combination with what I'm seeing on tape, to ensure that I'm not misconstruing what the calls are because I am certainly no expert. But by God they ran some serious Cover 2. And this hire... In spite of the fact that I think Morris is a head coach in the future, the nuts and bolts of it smack of friend hire to me. It's a bad fit. IMO and I hope I'm wrong.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/17/2021 05:09AM by Rams43.
