With the 17th Pick in the 2018 NFL Draft

[Formula 21]

[Formula 21]

Daniel Jeremiah of the NFL Network has his first mock draft up and has us taking:

PICK

17


Derwin James - S, Florida State



James was made to play in Gus Bradley's defenses. He's a more explosive version of Kam Chancellor.

[blueman]

Rather take Harrison in the 2nd.

[chris9341]

If the Chargers take a safety with there first pick then Tom Telseco is an idiot. Safety is the least of our worries. As I had mentioned in other posts DT should be our number one priority. I know some others have stated we should take a ILB also which if we did I would be happy with that. However as bad as some of our linebackers have played I still feel our defensive line is our weakest link on the defense.

[bonehead]

Agree mostly.....I really feel that interior D Line is a must also, even more than OLine

But if Tom Telesco takes a Safety then the guy must be a plug and play game changer on the back end....

[Steve]

Adding help at S would allow us to play more dime D, and use our LB less. The trend across the league has been going to more nickel and dime packages. If we can find players who are good against the run and pass, we can afford to stay in our dime most, if not all the time.

I did a quick look at the boxscores to all our games this past season. Because the box scores have very limited info, it has the longest run a particular (opposing) player had in a given game. If you add those up (excluding those that are 4 yards or less - where presumably the run D was doing it's job well), we gave up 771 yards on about 40 carries. That is over 1/3 of the total rushing yards we allowed. Furthermore, looking at the games we played the majority of our plays in our dime package only a couple did we give up a lot of run yards. Those games were vs Buffalo (when we had a big lead), the Jets (much of it was after Phillips went out hurt) and KC (we only played dime in the 2nd KC game, we were still playing a lot of base and nickel in the 1st). I also went back into my gamepass account and watched all the plays with the big plays given up. Mostly they are from the time when we are in our base D.

The other thing that is worth noting with that almost 800 yards rushing . If you shave off about 600 yards (those teams are going to get some of those yards even if we play those runs well) then that takes us from being one of the worst run defenses to one of the best.

The long and the short of it is the fastest way to improve our run D would be to stop playing the nickel and base D as much.

Remember, we were something like 1st or 2nd in short yardage/goalline situations (TT press conference). To some degree, we can matchup situationally and play good run D. The key is scheming the D so that it allows us to stop the majority of the time. That is our dime, not our base, because other teams don't play 21 or 12 personnel that much of the time.

[Formula 21]

Adding help at S would allow us to play more dime D, and use our LB less. The trend across the league has been going to more nickel and dime packages. If we can find players who are good against the run and pass, we can afford to stay in our dime most, if not all the time.

I did a quick look at the boxscores to all our games this past season. Because the box scores have very limited info, it has the longest run a particular (opposing) player had in a given game. If you add those up (excluding those that are 4 yards or less - where presumably the run D was doing it's job well), we gave up 771 yards on about 40 carries. That is over 1/3 of the total rushing yards we allowed. Furthermore, looking at the games we played the majority of our plays in our dime package only a couple did we give up a lot of run yards. Those games were vs Buffalo (when we had a big lead), the Jets (much of it was after Phillips went out hurt) and KC (we only played dime in the 2nd KC game, we were still playing a lot of base and nickel in the 1st). I also went back into my gamepass account and watched all the plays with the big plays given up. Mostly they are from the time when we are in our base D.

The other thing that is worth noting with that almost 800 yards rushing . If you shave off about 600 yards (those teams are going to get some of those yards even if we play those runs well) then that takes us from being one of the worst run defenses to one of the best.

The long and the short of it is the fastest way to improve our run D would be to stop playing the nickel and base D as much.

Remember, we were something like 1st or 2nd in short yardage/goalline situations (TT press conference). To some degree, we can matchup situationally and play good run D. The key is scheming the D so that it allows us to stop the majority of the time. That is our dime, not our base, because other teams don't play 21 or 12 personnel that much of the time.