Will the Seattle Seahawks Draft a Defensive End at #25?

Very few D-Ends make an impact in their rookie year. But still we’re going to need a pass rusher when we’ll hopefully be a contender in 2 or 3 years so it would be good to start developing them now. I still have faith Curry can be a 3rd down pass rusher both outside and inside. I thought he made some serious progress playing the nose of the bandit by the end of the year.

A 3-4 team isn’t going to draft Nick Fairley, for example.

I assume it was traded to free agency for brett favre, who converts to strong safety and eliminates 17 players from life by burning their souls out with his old man ‘you know what’ And in the sixth round, free agency selects Von Miller who fell down draft boards after Charlie Whitehurst whips GM’s in the eyes every time they think about drafting Von, and he is subsequently picked up in free agency by the seattle seahawks. I mean, thats what i assume happened…

Brandon Adams thinks so, anyway.

Not sure they’d do so well in an ordinary 4-3. It allows us to draft players later in the draft that wouldn’t be a good fit on ordinary schemes. At the same time I can’t tell you how much it pissed me off to see Tapp, LoJack, Wilson, Sims shipped off for lack of schematic fit. That’s the only reason I hate this defense. Otherwise, I thought it worked pretty well considering the talent available and probably made that group of players overachieve. I like to see what this defense can do with the right pieces. We have to get better pass rush out of the 3 tech, Mebane is not doing it and maybe needs to go back to the 1 tech. The 1 tech needs to be able to take on double teams consistently. And we need better play from the strongside linebacker. I think it’s a bit early to evaluate the scheme. It will probably take another year for Pete to put the right pieces in place and have ‘his’ guys playing the positions.

I’m not saying anything in support of the defensive philosophy, just that targetting a player like Justin Houston to play the Leo isn’t any different than how a 3-4 team evaluates talent.

while Houston might be a value pick, I think they’ll put DT above DE in the early rounds.

I see the Leo/5-tech more as Carroll’s fallback & workaround for when he doesn’t have good DEs. Kinda like comparative advantage from economics applied to football – instead of 2 DE’s that are each okay against the run and pass, he’d rather dedicate one to each job. The fact the Leo can be competently filled by cheap, fungible speed guys is an added bonus that makes it workable (but apparently cancelled out by the difficulty of finding the right 5-tech guy for the pros)

I really like that article you linked to – I’ve seen it before, but always worth a re-read. Carroll does highlight the importance of the 3-tech. But what I also take out of it is that he stresses gap control for all the positions, and notes the inherent danger in a 1-gap scheme of a ball-carrier knifing through. While he wants the RDE to be the best pass-rusher and sets that as their prime objective, he also points out they are on an island for run-support, and need to be able to take on the Tackle when blocked down. In the second section, where he gets into blitzes & stunts, you also see how a well-rounded RDE gives more options.

I guess that was just a long-winded way of saying that while Carroll can fill the Leo with a fringe player in a necessity, the scheme works a lot better, and more of the playbook is opened up, when filled with with a talented player. I think this is backed up by his D’s at USC – when he had those good DE’s (like Udeze) it looked more like a plain 4-3, when he didn’t have them, he used a LB’er. People confused it as a 3-4 when it was basically the 4-3 Under with the Leo. And since Carroll says he’s been staying true to this scheme since the late 70’s, I think it’s also instructive to see what he worked with in the Pros – in New York he had Jeff Lageman (14th overall pick), as DC in SanFran he had Ricky Jackson (2nd rounder & HOF’er) and Chris Doleman (4th overall pick and probable HOF’er), and in New England he had Willie McGinest (4th overall pick). So Carroll didn’t need to draft a pass-rusher at his prior NFL stops, because on each team he inherited a pretty good one. And these were not fringe guys or one-dimensional players like Clemmons – all of those guys were prototypical 4-3 DE/3-4 OLB types with talent levels that made them high draft picks.

So while I agree 3-tech is the more pressing need, it all comes down to value. The ‘Hawks could easily find themselves at #25 with the top QBs, the top DTs, and the best OG gone. So, faced with the decision of reaching early into the second tier of QBs or DTs, taking a chance on an attitude question like Smith, or wanting to trade down. If that’s the situation and Houston is still there, I pull the trigger on him without without hesitation. I’ve read that in any other DL class he’s likely a middle of the 1st round guy. He’s a solid prospect, and I’ve seen him draw some comparisons to Terrell Suggs as the type of player he is. IMO, it’d be a good value pick, and while the scrap-bin Leo was good enough this past season, history indicates the scheme works better as a whole when that spot is filled by a true impact player.

Could be Ponder

Seriously, he looks like a caveman.