Yup I agree, we need to address the DL so we can stop the run.. Can't disagree with you about that. We face teams in our division who love to run the ball.
The return of Warren, a healthy Brace, Wilkerson/Jordan/Watts/Heyward and another year of experience with Chung and Spikes should only make things that much better
But I like to add, I don't see any players returning or making a big jump to assist our pass defense.. Cunningham might take a step forward but we need someone opposite of him. I like Quinn 1st but if Kerrigan is there, I'd seriously take a look at him..
Well, that's the next step in the "logic" for me. Among TBC, Cunningham and Ninkovich, Ninko played the fewest snaps, but did come up with four sacks playing behind/alongside a D-line that not only did NOT help him find a lot of opportunities to get good pressure, but probably inhibited them by forcing him to pay a lot of extra attention to play-action. The same would apply to Cunningham, of course.
We got 36 sacks in 2010. Back in the days when the D-line run-contain was good, the pass defense was also good and the team generated 40-45 sacks. Typically, three guys got 7-9 sacks each with another three kicking in 4-6 each with a lot of variation from year-to-year in terms of which guy and which position produced the greatest amount of pressure.
My main hypothesis is that we're really not that far off from getting back to that. It's not that difficult for me to imagine Ninko adding another 2-3 sacks, Cunningham jumping up to the 4-5 range, Stroud and a new RDE kicking in 3-4 each (IOW, a total of 8 from the RDE position), Ty Warren getting a couple, Wilfork getting a couple, the ILBs as a group kicking in 4-6 (historically typical), DBs adding a couple and sub-rushers like Wright, TBC, Eric Moore, perhaps Deaderick kicking in anywhere from 3-8 each. Pretty quickly, it adds up to the successful, "studless", broad-based pass-rush we had in the past.