I miss BBK

Linebacker is by far the biggest concern on the defense, and it's not even close. There is no such thing as a "shutdown corner" who has to cover for eight seconds and work on an island every single play because the defensive coordinator feels he has no choice but to bring a safety and linebacker up to the LOS on every single play.

For either schematic or personnel reasons, the hook/curl zone is completely vacant on nearly every play, requiring outside-leverage corners to somehow miraculously cover both deep routes and in-breaking routes underneath. The ONE time--in three games--I saw a linebacker drop into the proper zone, Manu tipped a pass that Williams intercepted. Granted, I still haven't watched the whole game.

We've seen three straight seasons of an overall strategy of playing conservative up front--bringing three or four, with at least one of these three two-gapping and eating up space. Linebackers have been disciplined and generally filled the correct gap or been quick to recognize when to drop into zones for coverage responsibilities. The secondary, as a result, has a lot of options to mix coverages, and usually has help inside and deep and can more safely take risks and come off their man to create turnovers or make TFL on the perimeter game.

The secondary looks bad because A.) there are a few young guys back there who just aren't tackling well, and B.) there are just fewer defenders back in coverage overall. For whatever reason, the linebackers just don't exist. It's not like they're erasing the opponents' running games off the face of the earth, making a combined 30 tackles per game, but they've also been completely MIA in coverage. I don't like what the DL has been doing, but I think that's more a reflection of what they're asking from certain personnel groupings. And that said groupings exist in the first place (one of Tuli/Taki in on every standard down to eat blockers, please), so I'm not worried about the D-line from the standpoint of "unfixable"--put the right guys in at the right time and in the right combinations, and the talent is there to run roughshod over the conference. The linebackers, though? There's just not much you can do about that at this point. If they're not fitting the proper gaps now, I don't know what you do to make them all of a sudden. If they can't recognize and drop to zones quickly enough to influence passing lanes now, I don't know how you fix that.

Not blitzing them out of the play 81% of the tim might help...