A whole lot of talk about the "jack" position here, but maybe not enough about how we develop DEs. I said a couple years ago, and maybe one other time, that no matter what guys look like when they sign with us, if they're a DE they are going to end up at 265 +/- 5 pounds or so. What is the likelihood that the ideal size for every guy we sign is virtually identiccal? Kenyatta Jackson and Caden Curry were both around 240 in high school. Now? Well, of course, both 260. JT - 269, Sawyer 260. Friday was - 264. Harrison - 272. Melton - 261 (up from 240 a couple seasons ago). Honeslty folks, do we have some kind of cloning machine?
There were a bunch of b-ball teams that seemed slow to jump on the bandwagon of smaller, quicker guys. While some teams fielded a whole team of five in the 6'6" range plus or minus a little, other teams were still plugging in big, slow Centers. I'm wondering if we are doing the same thing by turning every DE prospect that enters the Woody into a clone of some mental picture we have of what a DE should look like.
What I really wonder about is whether we are totally missing out on how football has changed. Micah Parsons, Von Miller, Will Anderson, TJ Watt, and now we're all worried about Abdul Carter. All of those guys are "Disrupters". They're guys you have account for, maybe even scheme for. And they are all around 250. Maybe some of them are officially LBs, but they are among the most feared pass rushers in the league. So I'm asking you guys - do you think maybe it's time to rethink the whole concept of our front 7, especially the issue of cranking out 260-265 DEs from every prospect we get and playing an (old-fashioned) straight up 4-3? What about all these smaller, fast guys in the league that are causing nightmares for defenses?
