Curtis Lofton appreciation thread

[Barry from MS]

Originally Posted by Danno

A weak D-line can make a secondary look awful stat wise.

Conversely a great D-line can make a mediocre secondary look top notch.

For years people blamed our safeties much more than they should because our pass rush was woefully pathetic (the Will Smith years) and our CB's weren't all that great either. But they needed a scapegoat and Jenkins / Harper satisfied their anger.

Agreed 100%. DC scheme can also make a secondary, LBer's, and D-Line look truly pathetic. The Spags 2012 year is a perfect example.

With safeties & linebackers, you can't just use stats to truly sum up their performance. Especially so with safeties...how long did the QB have to scan the entire field? Which linebacker or corner blew a coverage? Which or how many D-linemen or LBers lost gap discipline or lost contain creating bad tackling angles for safeties already pre-positioned? Did the offense exploit mismatches created against a stoopid scheme (see Spags 2012)?

"Safety" is the most perfectly named position on the field...just in case a D-lineman, a linebacker, or a corner craps themselves on a play, a safety is there to clean it up. Sometimes, you just can't continually clean up all the crap that is being dumped on them by the Front 7 and the corners. Or a DC that has them mismatched in coverage or out of position constantly (see Spags 2012).