Now that he’s free from play-calling duties, Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy has been spending more time with his defensive coaches working to develop the long-term consistency his offense has established.

JSOnline  wrote:

Hard to be consistent when Dom can't figure out which players are the best to use for half the season.

Originally Posted by: steveishere 

hard to decide who the best fit is when Ted Thompson don't get him players to fit. This will all fall on Dom as usual when it should all fall on the guy that gets the players.

Originally Posted by: dhazer 

Half the season the defense is complete garbage and the other half after some adjustments it improves greatly. If there weren't good enough players in place any adjustments wouldn't have mattered but they did.

Originally Posted by: steveishere 

Last year's adjustment of putting Barrington and Clay at ILB, and relegating Hawk and Jones to the bench made an incredible difference in the defense. And all of us that have bitching about our weaknesses in the middle were somewhat vindicated for all the shit we've taken for our observations.

Moving forward, is Clay's best position ROLB full time or rover linebacker? I guess that all depends on Nick Perry and Mike Neal, and of course Julius Peppers. We have more talent on defense than we think we do, but improvements can always be made.

In the future, I would really rather not draft 4-3 defensive ends to play 3-4 OLB's. It makes no sense! When the Bears took McCullem ahead of us, the Packers should have traded out of the selection and not taken Nick Perry.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

Clays best position is OLB but the defenses best position is him moving around. Even after he improved over the 2nd half of the season last year most of his production still came from rushing OLB but it was harder for the other team to keep track of him because he wasn't just doing the same thing over and over again.

Drafting 4-3 DEs makes plenty of sense. Few college teams run 3-4 defenses so most of the high school edge rushing prospects end up on 4-3 teams. Relegating your edge rusher possibilities to only 3-4 teams is stupid because that takes your pool of players down to a handful out of hundreds of possibilites.

Originally Posted by: steveishere 

"Most of his production still came from rushing OLB?" what production are you referring to? Sure he gets more sacks and QB hurries from OLB, but he also gets more tackles and stuffs from ILB. from OLB he also get more failed to hold the edge for big gains or bites on fakes.

Clay or any players best position is where they do the most to help the team. It is to easy for a team to nullify Clay when he is OLB by chip blocking or running the ball. At ILB he has the best chance to impact every play.

Originally Posted by: PackFanWithTwins