Patrick Graham - DC

Graham is more soft than Austin. Graham allows long drives to happen.

Graham relies on
- DT and pressure. Not sacks.
- heavy on SS who is like the chess master.
- olb drop a lot
- young idiot DB excel in his defense. Because there's a ton of disguising.

Bottom line, young defense look great. But that aggression is bye bye. And on order for it to work, he needs a really good SS.

Think of it like this.
Graham.... refuses to lose
Austin/flores ..... want to win.

The typical defenses you see is Patriots. Look at superbowl 49 and 53. They relied heavy on SS and NB..... you lose those two, and kiss the season bye bye.


By the way, I'm not a fan of this. Not one bit. It spells a 9 winning season, maybe a playoff win, but nothing more than that, unless we have an insane Tom Brady show up (and no, Rodgers is not that. Rodgers can't do the long ball anymore with consistency).

 

Jpj thrived this year on one on one. He was meh the previous years because of coverage.

So don't expect the Steelers to pick up his contract. Even if he looks ok. Because another team will take him to one on one.

 

We do know what he did for the Raiders. He took meh players and had them look good, due to the disguise. But bully defense was not his specialty.

Tell me a coach that ran his system to having a good post season?

 

By pick up his contract do you mean giving him an extension this off season

I’d say that is a very high priority for them

 

We do actually know what he did with the Raiders, true. He ran Pete Carroll's defensive scheme.

 

Yeah that's what I'm meaning. But I don't see them doing it, if they like graham system. And I don't see jpj thriving in that system.

 

I’ll get back to you on this

 

Graham doesn't have "a scheme". It's one of the things I like about him. He has run completely different schemes everywhere he has gone. He adjusts the scheme to fit the talent on the roster.

Any talk about players not fitting his scheme is just wrong. We need to see the talent that the team acquires and find out what base he will be running. After that, he is going to use those players and teach them to be scheme flexible to do whatever he believes they need to do and use that as an advantage to try to matchup against any type of offense he is going against.

He isn't a guy that only runs a 4-3 or a 3-4. He will run and has run just about every defensive scheme under the sun. The one thing I feel most strongly about is that he is going to use his Belichick philosophy of having versatile players that are able to play in multiple schemes and be able to line up all over the place when it calls for it.

 

Looking more and more like Mr Rooney to blame
These scapegoats can no longer be used
Tomlin
Canada
A Smith
Our old DC
Rooney now is the common denominator

 

I do think we generally drafted well under Cowher.

But it's worth remembering that Lloyd was one of "Noll's players" (just like: Woodson, Lake, Dawson, NO'D, Jerry O, Seals, etc). And Kirkland was drafted a couple months after Cowher was hired, so Donahoe probably had a bigger say in that draft than Cowher did.

It was great when there were very few 3-4 teams in the league so fewer teams wanted tweener edges Cowher drafted (e.g., Gildon, Porter, Brown, etc)

 

It was a long time ago...but this was very similar to my initial reaction to the Kevin Colbert hiring. "We picked a GM from the ****ing Lions? The Lions? Are we just trying to show the rest of the league that we don't care who runs the team?"

Thankfully, I ended up being very wrong about Colbert. Even though the end of his tenure was lack luster, he was a very good GM for us.

Hopefully, this ends up being a positive move too (or at least a negative one).

And if it's not a good decision...I think I want a rebuild a lot more than Rooney does. If it happens by accident, I won't really complain (too much).

 

In an ideal world, I wanted Flores as our DC. To kind of serve as a "next LeBeau" type guy. Failed HC. Very good defensive mind (probably biased, but I don't know that anyone is a good on that front at LeBeau).

 

Yep. It is well known that Carrol took over the defense the last half of the season. The defense performed much worse running Carrol's defense.

Also, don't discount that Carrol and the Raiders were tanking for the #1 pick in the draft late. In spite of all that and the Raiders brass holding players out with some bogus injuries at the end of the season, Graham still put up very solid defensive numbers with an offense that averaged 14.2 points per game.

I'm not sure why some people are making claims about what scheme he runs. If they knew how diverse his defenses have been since he has been a DC with several teams, they wouldn't be making those claims.

I think McCarthy will let him run his defense the way he wants to. It may take a while for everything to take hold because there is a lot to learn when there are multiple schemes and techniques to master, but I can't wait to see what he comes up with.

 

This
Not a HC
Would’ve loved to have had as a DC

 

I agree on the Sawyer part and was going to mention that. I do think we draft a FS early.

 

Who wouldn't?

 

Maybe bully defense wasn't his specialty because he really wasn't in the situation to run it. He had a weak roster and an incompetent offense that kept running them back out on the field. Raiders had the 32nd ranked time of possession. It could be that he needed to design a D that wouldn't wear out his players so quickly. All arrows point to a coach who got more out of his D than should have been expected.

 

The one thing that I think of with the Raiders D is Crosby moving around, keeping the QB guessing where he'll be coming from. When I think of TJ, I think of him lining up against the RT, getting chipped or doubled by the TE or RB who knows exactly where to find him, and us seeing the exact same thing every time the QB drops back.

 

Nice rant

 

Not the pete Carrol defense of Dan Quinn.

 

I liked what the Steelers defense was doing late in the season when they were bringing in Herbig and lining him up like a middle linebacker that could, play straight up, blitz, or drop into coverage. I always think it's a great idea to give the offense something to think about because of the disguise, and the versatility of players to be good enough at multiple spots of the defense and be effective and make plays. I think Graham will do more things like that on important down and distance situations to try to get off the field. They can help Watt by lining up a guy like Herbig on third down right next to him threatening Herbig to rush the gap inside the tackle. It forces changes in protections for the offense and puts doubts in the minds of the offense. Then they can rush or drop all or none of them and have offensive linemen blocking air due to the confusion.

People are worried about Graham, but I don't think people remember that he was under Flores with the Dolphins. People don't seem to know that he ran a similar defense to Brian Flores' defense with the Raiders in 2024.

All the people wishing they hired Flores don't seem to realize that Graham can run that defense here. He can run Belichick's various forms of defenses here. He can literally run any defense that anyone else in the NFL runs and fans here wish for.

It's going to see fun to see how it develops. I hope he is super successful.