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In an effort to get through the next 10 days I'm offering another thread to keep our minds busy and perhaps answer a question that popped into my mind.. I have to thank Jack Bauer for the inspiration for this one. In the Talib thread, he and some others had been going back and forth on the McCourty to safety debate and it got me thinking about a thread I started over a year ago and I think has relevance even more now, especially if you favor moving McCourty
The thread I started posited the idea that since so much of the passing offense (at least the Pats') is now being run inside the numbers, isn't having an elite safety more valuable than an elite CB. At the time I was thinking about the example of how the Pats dealt with Revis when they played the Jets. In 2011 they by and large ignored him. In other words they pretty much made the best player on the Jets irrelevant, by simply throwing passes to all the people Revis WASN'T covering, and in doing so piled up 30+ ppg and a ton of yards
Now if your best player happened to be a Safety it would be much more difficult, if not impossible to marginalize him like we did Revis last year. So in that thread I made the case that the Safety position is to become the most important position on the defensive side of the ball and soon teams would be paying elite Safeties 8 figure salaries and not CBs
Now even though I have come strongly on the side of keep McCourty at CB, I can't help but remember that thread and perhaps second guess myself. But rather than refight a debate that has already wasted too much band space. Lets broaden the debate.
Given that so much of today's short passing attack occurs between the numbers. Given the increased importance of the slot receiver (Welker, Cruz, etc). Given the growing importance of the hybrid TE's like Hernandez and Graham. Given the growth of of 2 TE/2WR offenses around the league And given the seeming lack of quality safeties throughout the league....Isn't it MORE valuable to acquire an elite Safety than an elite CB????
And for the purpose of our hypothetical: if you had 20-20 foresight and knew for an absolute certainly that Devin McCourty is going to develop into a top 5 shut down CB in the league OR the next incarnation of Ed Reed, where would you want to have him play and why?
The floor is now open and we have 13 more meaningless games to get through that we REALLY don't care a lot about, so we have a lot of time to kill.. Have at it
The thread I started posited the idea that since so much of the passing offense (at least the Pats') is now being run inside the numbers, isn't having an elite safety more valuable than an elite CB. At the time I was thinking about the example of how the Pats dealt with Revis when they played the Jets. In 2011 they by and large ignored him. In other words they pretty much made the best player on the Jets irrelevant, by simply throwing passes to all the people Revis WASN'T covering, and in doing so piled up 30+ ppg and a ton of yards
Now if your best player happened to be a Safety it would be much more difficult, if not impossible to marginalize him like we did Revis last year. So in that thread I made the case that the Safety position is to become the most important position on the defensive side of the ball and soon teams would be paying elite Safeties 8 figure salaries and not CBs
Now even though I have come strongly on the side of keep McCourty at CB, I can't help but remember that thread and perhaps second guess myself. But rather than refight a debate that has already wasted too much band space. Lets broaden the debate.
Given that so much of today's short passing attack occurs between the numbers. Given the increased importance of the slot receiver (Welker, Cruz, etc). Given the growing importance of the hybrid TE's like Hernandez and Graham. Given the growth of of 2 TE/2WR offenses around the league And given the seeming lack of quality safeties throughout the league....Isn't it MORE valuable to acquire an elite Safety than an elite CB????
And for the purpose of our hypothetical: if you had 20-20 foresight and knew for an absolute certainly that Devin McCourty is going to develop into a top 5 shut down CB in the league OR the next incarnation of Ed Reed, where would you want to have him play and why?
The floor is now open and we have 13 more meaningless games to get through that we REALLY don't care a lot about, so we have a lot of time to kill.. Have at it