It's a brutal game... I hope he remains healthy.
Link: https://twitter.com/i/status/1579790665080139777
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his knee and peroneal nerve.
Decker shoved him forcefully from the side right after the play was dead. Jaylon made the mistake of trying to right himself instead of just falling over, and extended his leg to stop himself, and then disaster happened. His instincts took over.
He was the best talent we ever had at linebacker, and it's a horrible shame the way Van Gorder didn't use his talents properly.
T'eo and Stonebreaker (prior to that awful car accident) are close seconds, though.
Decker was a cheap shot artist, and if karma catches up to him, then he'll certainly have earned whatever awful fate comes his way.
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Those three guys were great players in their own right, but they had decent coaching behind them.
Smith had Van Gorder... If it weren't for Jaylon Smith's unearthly talent and natural instincts, there would have been a 6-7 game shift from the win column to the loss column between 2014 and 2015's seasons.
His presence alone kept Van Gorder from getting fired outright during those years.
That’s incredible, mind boggling…
Jaylon Smith was so good in coverage, that he all but took away many of the short routes in the middle. He also had amazing closing speed and anticipation.
To put it this way, even after he wrecked his knee, his instincts and anticipation were so good that the Cowboys took him the 2nd round.
In 2014 and 2015, we had enough trouble covering the WR's on the outside, that if anyone else had been playing at Smith's linebacker position, the TE's and WR's would have had an absolute field day over the middle at short range. Just look at 2016 for an example of that...
I'm also not exaggerating how bad Brian Van Gorder was when it came to playcalling.
That's downright criminal.
You almost have to design a system with the explicit intent of limiting him for that to happen.
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Blitzing a minimum of 6 on every play against 4/5 receiver sets that are expecting it. Having D.B.'s whose reads somehow put them 3-4 yards behind receivers running Go Routes with about 100% consistency.
Worse, calling the occasional base set of sending strictly the 3 or 4 down linemen and leaving 7/8 in coverage, seeing that call be successful, and then immediately rushing 7 the next several plays.
I despise him for his stupidity.
Van Gorder was just plain incompetent, he couldn't help himself. Kelly was fairly competent, so he should not have hired him or should have fired him once it was clear Van Gorder couldn't cut it.
2014 was easily a 10-win team sans Van Gorder. Literally swap him with one of the other defensive coaches or analysts and send him packing, and we would have won Northwestern and Louisville.
2015 was a playoff team sans Van Gorder. He directly cost us Stanford, and Clemson is arguable.
2016 inexplicably had him for 5 games, when he should have been off the staff at least a year earlier. Texas, Michigan State, Duke....all of those would have been wins with any other replacement-level or worse D.C. And had we started 4-1, I sincerely doubt we've have finished 4-8. I can't be convinced we'd have collapsed against Stanford, Navy, and Virginia Tech if we weren't already having a disaster of a season.
Bottom line, we'd have probably won at least 30 games in that stretch and made our first playoff appearance. Instead, we won 22 games and set the program back from both a recruiting and player development standpoint.
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They were in a pretty bad situation with the salary cap, from what I remember, which is why they waived him to clear up more space.
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