Our linebackers are slow.

+1 Rez.

The LB position has to become a priority in next years draft. And I don't mean selecting guys in the 4th, 5th rounds either.

I was watching that LB Shazier (rookie) kid for Pittsburgh last night. Where ever Cam Newton thought of running, there Shazier was.. on a B line to make the tackle for minimal gain OR to wipe him out.

We need someone like that to arrive with bad intentions at the LB position.

Why does our front office suck so bad at acquiring stud linebackers?

I have NO IDEA about why, today, this is so true. But I do remember, something I read from back in the relative start of the Gregg Williams era.

I wanted to know more about GW, so I went digging for articles about him and his past defenses, his past career history as a coordinator. This must have been in late '09 to maybe 2010 sometime. I really dug for articles all over the place, every team he'd had a defense for, I read a ton about him.

And this one Washington DC sports writer wrote an article, that was kind of a post-mortem autopsy on WIlliams' time in Washington as he was leaving there. And in it, he kinda said that, one of Gregg Williams' "things" that he did on defense at all his various different teams, was to have ONE really good linebacker, to sort of anchor the position, and then surround that one key player with a bunch of faceless fly-by-night nobodies around him, journeymen linebackers, plugging them in and out. But your anchor guy at LB was gonna carry the day for the group. Which is sort of exactly what happened with Vilma, here.

And one of the downfalls of that Gregg Williams defense in Washington DC, mentioned in that article, was that as time went by, they couldn't replace the BIG playmaker guy (Marcus Washington) as anchor, and they were left with nothing but faceless fly-by-nights.

Now obviously, of course Williams is long gone and we've had two different coordinators in here since then, and no idea what Ryan is thinking....

But the lingering effects of those 2-3 Williams era defensive drafts (P-Rob, Malcolm Jenkins) and the style of building the defensive team over the last 3-4 years, PLUS a virtually useless funky Spagnuolo/Bountygate draft, PLUS never really properly addressing replacing Vilma as a STUD linebacker and true LEADER of the defense (a leader, not "Captain").....I dunno....just a theory, but maybe that is some of what we are seeing with our lame linebacker corps.

I mean right now Lofton is supposed to be "THE GUY" at linebacker, the stud, and everybody else is sort of like, who? Who is this guy? And nobody is standing out. They're all pretty useless.

We already have a Shazier-type player in Vaccaro. If we are going back to the defense we used last year, like the ESPN article today said, then we are set up with a lot of pursuit speed at the second level.

---------Bush---------------------Byrd----------



White--------------Vacarro------------------Lewis



-----Galette----------Lofton--------Hawthorne----

------Jordan-------- Bunkley---------Hicks--------


This is a setup that gives you tons of flexibility because Vaccaro can move practically anywhere on the field pre-snap. I do not understand why we abandoned it early in this season but if the Triplett article is correct we're going to see a lot more of the 2013 style defense in the coming weeks.

You see other teams linebackers getting interceptions, maybe just 1 or 2

The last interception one of our linebackers got was in 2010, Scott shanle picked off a tipped matt ryan pass.