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Secondary Education
Did the Oakland Raiders give DeAngelo
Hall too
big of a contract?
by
Bill
Chuang
Head
Columnist
3/25/08
Archive
I was very surprised, though perhaps
I shouldn’t have been that the Raiders signed DeAngelo Hall to the a 7
year $70 million contract (with bonuses could be the richest).
Hall may be perennially the fastest
man in the NFL, but he’s not the best cover corner in the league.
That title belongs to Champ Bailey, and Hall can’t carry Bailey’s jock
strap. After applying the exclusive franchise tag to Nnamdi
Asomugha, the Raiders will have the most expensive defensive backfield
in the game. Since they used the more expensive and prohibitive
“exclusive” tag on Asomugha, he will be paid the average of the 5 top
CB salaries as of April this year. That will include the new
record contracts for Hall and Asante Samuel. Add to that, the salary of
the newly overpaid free agent safety Gibril Wilson as well as the
salaries of former first rounders, Michael Huff and Fabian Washington
and the Raiders easily have the highest paid defensive backfield in NFL
history. Even one of their new backup corners, previous starter
Stanford Routt was a high second round pick. Since I don’t have a
research staff, and my baby’s crying, I’m going to conservatively
estimate that this backfield consumes about 25% of the team’s cap
space. That’s a lot of money considering the Raiders biggest
problems are on offense.
| I’m from the old school
thinking that “defense wins
championships”, so I don’t have an issue with spending so much on
defense, but I think the Raiders would have been wiser to spend that
cap space on their front seven. The Giants showed in the Super
Bowl
what a truly dominating defensive front seven can do to the best
offense ever put on the field. Under constant pressure, Brady
looked
only above average, not his usual superhuman self. The year
before
that, the Colts won the big game with a decent, but not great
secondary. It’s a bit ironic that the Raiders are spending so
much on
their secondary. After all, Al Davis is the one who proclaimed
“The
quarterback must go down, and he must go down hard.” Perhaps
Davis was
harking back to the glory days of the early eighties when he had Lester
Hayes and Mark Haynes patrolling the secondary. Back then, it was
suicidal throwing into that secondary. Hayes and Haynes would
cover
for so long that it gave time for the defensive linemen to get to the
quarterback. |
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The only other secondary I can think of that compares is
the Browns of the late-eighties with corners Frank Minnifield and
Hanford Dixon. Even in the mid nineties when Deion Sanders
was paired
with the likes of Merton Hanks in San Francisco and Kevin Smith in
Dallas, two good corners in the secondary could make a defense
great.
Back then, the game was not as wide open. Cornerbacks were
allowed to
have more contact with the receivers, to the point where we might call
it abuse today. It was a hit from another Raider DB, Jack
Tatum,that
paralyzed Daryl Stingley in a preseason game in 1978.
The game has changed though, with so many teams using spread offenses
employing four and five wide receiver sets, shut down corners just
don’t make as much of a difference. With 4 wide receivers, the
tight
end, and a receiving running back and that is 6 receivers on the field
at one time. Even with two great corners blanketing the top
wideouts
that leaves 4 receivers to be covered by the safeties and
linebackers.
To counter these wide open sets, defenses have gone to more zone
defenses such as cover twos and threes. These types of defenses
do not
require the tight man to man coverage that a shut down corner can
provide. The corners under these systems just need to be sure
tacklers. Just look at the Broncos this past season. They
have the
best corner in the game in Champ Bailey and they brought in Pro bowler
Dre Bly. On paper, this should have been the best secondary in
the
league, and in theory, one of the best defenses. The secondary
did do
a good job finishing the season ranked 7th in pass yards allowed, but
the defense finished 19th in yards allowed and 28th in points
allowed.
They finished 17th in sacks. If you look at the entire league, of
the
top 5 sacking teams in the league last year, all made the playoffs, and
the top 2 made it to the Super Bowl. In contrast, of the
teams that
finished in the top five in pass defense, 3 made the playoffs, and none
won a single playoff game.
Can there even be a shutdown corner these days? The top
quarterbacks
are so good at quickly finding the open receivers, and their releases
are so quick that even the best corners would be hard pressed to
prevent a completion. Add to that the fact that the NFL seems
bound
and determined to hamstring the corners with the renewed emphasis on
contact after 5 yards and you have to wonder how any cornerback can
earn a living. Last year, San Francisco made Nate Clements the
highest
paid defensive player in NFL history. Their defense gave up 227
pass
yards/game and 346 total yards/game in 2007 with Nate Clements vs 223
and 344 respectively in 2006 before Nate Clements. Obviously the
highest paid defensive player in the game did not make much of a
difference for this defense, even though that 2007 defense was also
bolstered by the addition of Patrick Willis. This year, the
Eagles
made Asante Samuel the new highest paid defensive player in the
game.
They were also in the running for Randy Moss. If they had saved
the
money from the Samuel deal and thrown it at Moss, they could have given
McNabb his best wideout since T.O. and made the Eagles a force in the
NFC. I doubt that either Samuel or Hall will make much of an
impact on
either of their teams this year. |
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