By the way, great picture Whiskeyjack. I agree with you that Joe is the best at orchestrating the front 7 but I think/would hope that this defense has a near complete understanding of the playbook now unlike last season.
Did our defense look like it had a complete understanding of the playbook against UVA? It's hard to tell if that performance was the result of ND looking ahead to GT, UVA saving lots of schematic surprises for us, or some combination of the two. But we have no reason to be confident that Nyles can fill Joe's shoes as far as leadership and intangibles go.
With that assumption, the drop off with Joe out in regards of reads and getting everyone in position wouldn't be as severe as people think.
How does that square with the 2nd half of the 2014 season? After Joe went down against Navy, our defense
collapsed. Despite his superior athleticism, the drop off between Nyles and Joe was tremendous last year.
The triple option, while difficult to defend, doesn't require much more than a vanilla defense with players strictly following their assigned roles.
We've only beaten Navy comfortably a couple times over the last decade. Again, how much of that is ND looking ahead/ Navy saving wrinkles/ Navy getting up for their biggest game? I don't know. But if all we had to do to stop the triple option was play assignment-correct football from our base defense, we would have watched the Irish cruise a lot more frequently than has happened.
Nyles Morgan could easily be prepared to run the defense and provide a lot more speed to the edge.
He clearly wasn't prepared last year. How much could have changed in the last ~9 months?
I think that speed to the edge could be the deciding factor in the game with a player like Justin Thomas (apparently he has ran the 40 in the 4.2 range....).
He's rumored to run in the low 4.3s, but we'll see how accurate that is if he gets a combine invite. Regardless, he won't have an easy time getting away from Jaylon.
grin:
