If Berry is back I’d want Sorenson as a linebacker. He needs to get up there and stop the run. Drop the hammer Dirty Dan!!

Ward is going to be very above average once he blossoms

And we have him for 2 years!!

The opposite is actually a better scenario. Plays to their strengths better.

I still think folks have been mis-identifying Sorensen's strengths for as long as he's been here.

He's a well built white dude but he's not actually all that good in run support. Moreover, he's damn athletic. He's not John Lynch out there; he's more of a Roy Williams type. Roy was never as good as I thought he'd be because he just wasn't all that sound. But holy hell was he athletic and aggressive. He wanted to smoke folks, he wanted to go looking to lay lumber where he could but he was oft times not where he needed to be because his aggression.

Sorensen is a lot like that. People want to act like he's this stout run-support box safety and he just isn't. Or that he's a lumbering oaf in coverage and that's not right either. What he is to my eyes is an old school strong safety who is a little better in coverage than the run but not comfortable in space enough to be where he SHOULD be athletically and that's a free safety.

His tackling is often overestimated and his range/athleticism is often underestimated. He's a weird cat who can play a handful of positions but not any of them terribly well, IMO.

can we just stop to imagine what the sack numbers would look like if we had competent coverage more often early in the year?

By gawd someone needs to be constantly checking the pressure on the balls
#deflategate

If they can generate some pressure on the interior with any combination of Jones, Nnadi, Ford and Houston, they can really disrupt what the Pats want to do on offense.

I expect that the blitz % will be the lowest we've seen in any game this season.

I completely agree with you on that Seattle game.

Your expectation is likely to be reality.

DJ outlined how Sutton works against the Patriots. There's going to be a lot of 3 and 4-man rushes, which people hate, but that's how you defend New England.

In the past, those fronts looked terrible because we couldn't get pressure. Now with Nnadi improving, Houston playing lights out, and Chris Jones looking like he came from another planet, they can get pressure out of those fronts.

What I've hated about Sutton's scheme in the past against Brady is the soft coverage in the secondary.

I'm hoping that the emergence of Ward and Lucas. and the return of Berry has them tighter on the LOS so they can affect the timing of routes.

Well until this year, his scheme worked pretty well, most likely due to the present of said Eric Berry.

I think a lot of the problems this season were compensation for lack of talent on the backend. Sutton's biggest problem was not biting the bullet and getting the young guys in earlier.

But hey, they're in the AFC Championship game. It's all hindsight at this point.