"Steady Shanle" Appreciation Thread

[SaintsBro]

One of the Gregg Williams patented "things" is finding kinda "no-name" guys and coaching them up to be decent for the scheme. All his defenses are like this.... No, Shanle is not MVP or Hall Of Fame type material, but I find it really weird when people get all psyched up over Gregg Williams defenses in one thread, and then turn around and bash on Shanle in another -- it's guys like Shanle who have made Gregg Williams defenses work, every place he's been. My take on Gregg Williams' "thing" at the linebacker position, both here and other places, is that it's based around having one excellent or GREAT linebacker, and then a bunch of faceless no names, who as long as they do their job, with a very strong secondary and a certain type of guys on the D-line, the overall scheme should work.

Of course when it doesn't work and it's directly Shanle's fault, that's one thing -- I'll yell as loud as anybody. But to me, griping about Shanle all the time is sorta like, I start wondering if maybe some people should go root for a different team, one that has a different defensive coordinator and a different defensive philosophy than the Saints. Because Shanle IS a classic Gregg Williams type of player, in terms of pieces of the puzzle. So were Fujita and Casillas and Clark and Dunbar, none of them are big names or "holy terror" kinda linebackers. This is not the Dome Patrol, and it's never gonna be that.