FlyingGreg":2tnwmgbl said:
MontanaHawk05":2tnwmgbl said:
Outside of Clark and Reed, it still feels like a lot of pressures and hits and not a lot of getting home. But it could still be a promising group. This secondary is certainly giving them the time they need - there was plenty of Stafford standing around in the pocket not knowing what to do yesterday.
Martin's definitely been the loudest amongst the "still developing" crowd.
Yes. They are "almost there" most of the time.
This is still very good production.
It's not manifest in sacks. But it definitely fits the whole philosophy of the defense. Almost getting there means not attempting bigger passes and resulting in better scoring defense.
Take our pass defense. It's pretty good. Currently, we are holding QBs to the third lowest rating in the league.
Yet we're the 12th worst in terms of completion percentage. We're allowing a lot of passes to be completed. But they are all high percentage, short passes. We are middle of the pack in sacks so yes, we're not getting home. But QBs are avoiding sacks by attempting lower impact passes.
Pressures tend to be the mother's milk of that kind of phenomenon. Hurries have a cumulative impact on the defense as a whole and we're seeing that. And in fact hurries are a much more predictive metric for future performance than sacks which are often mercurial and come in bunches.
At this point, with these guys -- hurries should be seen as promising. Not all of them will transition their game from consistent hurries to hurries + sacks. But odds are one or two might well do so by the beginning of next year.
