Dear god...

I was going to post this as a comment to Juice's post about Capers being hired, but then it got too long so I said fuck it.

It's official, we're going 3-4.

Where is Kampman going to play? He's too small for a DL in a 3-4 and he's not quick/agile enough to cover anyone as a LB, so he'd basically be a permanent down rusher LB or what I like to call a 4-3. I shouldn't rag on Kampman too much, this isn't his fault and he's surprised me before, maybe he beefs up, adds 20 pounds and becomes this monster O lineman clog that the 3-4 really requires to excel.

What about our linebackers? I think the middle will be fine with Barnett and *gag me as I dare to say this because I was his biggest critic last year* AJ Hawk. So then what are we left with? A DE/LB hybrid on the outside like Kampman or, dare I even hint at it, Peppers? Maybe say fuck Hawk and toss Poppinga in the weak middle side and the leave Hawk somewhere on the outside? We need at least one of those two outside linebackers to be a legitimate pass rush threat, that's just the way the 3-4 works, flexible, variable but constantly generating pressure.

So if we don't get Peppers, which I'm probably 95% certain that we won't, and if we then move Kampman to that DE/LB hybrid spot I see two problems. First of all, Kampman might be able to line up on which ever side he wants to, but in the end he's probably never going to be a threat to have any coverage responsibilities, I just don't see him as capable of doing it. That being said it should be pretty easy for an offensive line to figure out where that "flexible and variable" pressure is going to be coming from.

The second problem I see is if we lose Kampman from the D-line, who is going to be our D-linemen then? I think Pickett will be fine where he's at in the middle, but 3-4 DE's are typically a little beefier, we almost want a scheme where its a 5-2 with the 3 D-linemen being close to DT size and we want them to eat up 5 offensive blockers so the two random blitzers out of our LBing corp can slice in untouched. Obviously this is best case scenario and not something that always happens. We have Jenkins, Jolly, Thompson and Montgomery left to fill in the two outside spots in the D-Line, two are bigger DT type sizes, pushing "310" as the program might say and the other two are your typical DE around 270.

It should be noted that I'm listing these issues at as "problems", they might not actually end up being problems, just conflicts I'm forseeing in the future.

Another issue I see is with our secondary, 3-4's typically rely on more zone coverage looks in the secondary and we all saw how well Al Harris has handled zone in the past. Now that's just Al, and I think they might adopt a more, put Al on an island with his bump and run. Of course we've seen him get torched against good WR's very easily with this philosophy as well. And let's face it, we're not switching to the 3-4 because we can't beat the bad teams, for the most part we can do that, it's because the good teams have too many answers to what we are trying to accomplish.

This post started off a lot more negatively but as I went through the roster I saw we still have some holes in certain positions, but not the 5 or 6 I had worked out in my head while starting to type.