Pick 23: Malachi Lawrence EDGE

Smitty said:
You don't need an alpha stopper at CB. You need depth and technical soundness and we should have at least the depth at the moment especially if Downs is excelling in the slot.
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How do you counter the elite WR's-- the most dangerous offensive threats in football?

Good OC's scheme them out of double-teams all the time and usually at the worst possible time. What then?

In playoff-level football or in the biggest games it often boils down to whether or not you can stop these guys without sacrificing defense elsewhere.

Even the biggest no-name defense out there, Seattle, has Devon Witherspoon, a three time pro-bowler in his first three seasons.

No pass rush in history successfully pressures in every passing situation. Your top CB has to take on the toughest threats a majority of the time to take the heat off the rest of the defense.

I like how we've been building this defense a lot like Seattle built theirs. But we also need the capping CB (and another DL). Maybe Moore becomes that guy. It's not Bland. Marvin Harrison totally exposed and exploited that possibility. Zero trust.
 
Chocolate Lab said:
Bland was playing hurt last year, too.
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Yeah and the scheme/coaching impact that as well. How long are you asking your corner to cover for? Are you giving that corner safety help over the top? Are you allowing your corner to press or are you asking him to play 10 yards off the ball?

Will Bland ever really be elite? Probably not. Could Revel? Who the hell knows. At one point I would have said Revel has that potential but that was before he blew his knee out. I'm just glad he will have the opportunity to learn from a coach with a proven track record in developing corners while also having the chance to be healthy doing it. Hopefully no more bionic knee brace, no more limitations. Hopefully he can just cut it lose.

And Moore, who knows. I think he has some elite physical tools but he is a rookie fourth round pick. We will just have to wait and see but for right now I'm penciling him in as fourth on the depth chart at corner. And for the most part we are only going to use 2 corners because the third is likely going to be a safety.
 
Chocolate Lab said:
Bland was playing hurt last year, too.
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That's true, but even still I don't think many view him as a top corner in this league, despite his contract and his miraculous pick-six record-setting season.

I think things will be better overall with better coaching, stronger support in the secondary, and a better pass rush.

I'm always rooting for The BLANDER :lol , but I gotta keep it real wrt exactly how good he is. He's a good CB and at times, really good.

Not a top ten guy, and maybe we don't need that, but it really helps if we have one.

Not to build around, but rather to top an already good front seven and secondary
 
ravidubey said:
I think things will be better overall with better coaching, stronger support in the secondary, and a better pass rush.
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Everything on defense was such a mess it is hard to evaluate much on defense last season as a result. Was it the pass rush, was it the mass confusion, was it that one guy couldn't trust the guy next to him to do his job, was it just a badly flawed scheme (Corners 10 yards off the ball on a 3rd and 5 and a 3 or 4 man rush)
 
Cowboysrock55 said:
Everything on defense was such a mess it is hard to evaluate much on defense last season as a result. Was it the pass rush, was it the mass confusion, was it that one guy couldn't trust the guy next to him to do his job, was it just a badly flawed scheme (Corners 10 yards off the ball on a 3rd and 5 and a 3 or 4 man rush)
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I will always have the belief that it was more than just scheme.

The truth is the defense has been very bad going all the way back to the end of 2023.

They were atrocious in that Packers playoff game and they were atrocious at the beginning of 2024, even before Parsons got hurt. When Parsons returned from injury that year it did get a bit better, but I suspect that zimmer did a much better job stabilizing that unit than we realize.

And of course last year was what it was.

But that's three defensive coordinators in a row - veteran guys who have coached pretty good defenses in the past - who had atrocious years with us.

I think the scheme sucked but it was more than just that. The players sucked too, as evidenced by the fact that it's really been going back to 2023 and three different DCs failed to solve it.

It's just a shame that it took the idiots in the front office three off seasons before they realized they had to radically overhaul the personnel on the defense.

But at least it's here now, and I'm sort of kind of getting excited.

Not just because of Parker, who I think is promising, but also because the players seem worlds better and there seems to be an actual cohesive plan rather than just trying to randomly upgrade individual spots.

We'll see but it's the right path, I'm certain of that.

Anyway, a guy like Revel pretty much has no chance in that environment. So I agree with you that we can't really fairly evaluate him until we see him this year.
 
Genghis Khan said:
I will always have the belief that it was more than just scheme.
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It absolutely was more than just scheme. But God the scheme was maddening to watch last year. I think some people blame scheme for players that just aren't what they once were. Diggs, it wasn't the scheme, he just became a terrible player after his injury. Wilson, it wasn't scheme, he just wasn't a good player anymore. LBer, Murray was just no joke awful at doing anything.

Bland, I think his injury was absolutely hampering him.

Revel, didn't play until the middle of the season and he had this giant bulky knee brace on. Tell me a corner who can run while needing a knee brace like that.

But I'm not going to absolve a scheme that was just terrible. And you can ask Bears fans, they will back up the fact that the scheme is god awful when he was there too. It was terrible to watch. Do nothing to create pressure. Do nothing to impact receivers. Guys just running wide open all over the place because no one could run the zone concepts you're trying to run. I liked what I saw from Williams and Clark but as a QB pressure didn't even matter because guys were so wide open.

You can preach a great front 4 all you want but you need the back end to at least force the QB to hold the ball. We rarely did that against anyone except maybe Hurts who can't read a defense to save his life.
 
The defense has been rotten for a long, long time.

Parsons’ arrival along with Dan Quinn gave us a new paint job and Quinn’s schemes built around subbing confusing personnel groups plus Parsons’ playmaking got us bunches of turnovers which covered up our rotting wood.

That brief period wasn’t going to last as we weren’t built to sustain and teams caught onto and countered the trickery. We also mistakenly invested in Diggs and Mazi to make things worse. DLaw left and the damn broke open wide.

It’s a cycle that’s repeated for a long while in Dallas. We lacked a defensive front since Wade’s time, and even his teams missed the NT to anchor. Ratliff was too small and Spears wasn’t any good. Canty was a fine two-gaper, but not a pass rusher. Hatcher was a better 4-3 guy as were Ellis and Glover.

In fact, Glover was our best 3T since Leon Lett, but that team was still average on defense.

We’d draft CB’s and DE’s in the first, injured guys in the second, and scrounge to the remaining defensive personnel. Guys like Alonzo Spellman, Greg Hardy, and Demetrius Underwood exemplified the lazy-building, circus mentality.

No DT’s to speak of. Rarely a LB, and he’d be fundamentally injured when we got one.

In 2014 we strung together a total ragtag group that lost a starter every other game.

THIS draft, coupled with the trades for real DT’s last year and the Blands and Overshown carrying over from Quinn’s time has the potential to change everything for quite some time.

There is power up front, pass rushing potential at every front seven position, and no one is undersized playing out of position. It’s like we actually wanted to build a defense instead of relying on a 1st round CB to put lipstick on a pig.

Now the CB is ironically the last piece to add. Who’s running this team and what have they done to the Joneses? Not that I care.
 
ravidubey said:
The defense has been rotten for a long, long time.

Parsons’ arrival along with Dan Quinn gave us a new paint job and Quinn’s schemes built around subbing confusing personnel groups plus Parsons’ playmaking got us bunches of turnovers which covered up our rotting wood.

That brief period wasn’t going to last as we weren’t built to sustain and teams caught onto and countered the trickery. We also mistakenly invested in Diggs and Mazi to make things worse. DLaw left and the damn broke open wide.

It’s a cycle that’s repeated for a long while in Dallas. We lacked a defensive front since Wade’s time, and even his teams missed the NT to anchor. Ratliff was too small and Spears wasn’t any good. Canty was a fine two-gaper, but not a pass rusher. Hatcher was a better 4-3 guy as were Ellis and Glover.

In fact, Glover was our best 3T since Leon Lett, but that team was still average on defense.

We’d draft CB’s and DE’s in the first, injured guys in the second, and scrounge to the remaining defensive personnel. Guys like Alonzo Spellman, Greg Hardy, and Demetrius Underwood exemplified the lazy-building, circus mentality.

No DT’s to speak of. Rarely a LB, and he’d be fundamentally injured when we got one.

In 2014 we strung together a total ragtag group that lost a starter every other game.

THIS draft, coupled with the trades for real DT’s last year and the Blands and Overshown carrying over from Quinn’s time has the potential to change everything for quite some time.

There is power up front, pass rushing potential at every front seven position, and no one is undersized playing out of position. It’s like we actually wanted to build a defense instead of relying on a 1st round CB to put lipstick on a pig.

Now the CB is ironically the last piece to add. Who’s running this team and what have they done to the Joneses? Not that I care.
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The defense was varying levels of shit for basically a decade from 2010 until 2021 when Parsons joined. You had a couple of really good defenses around 2018-19, which never really lasted and seem almost random in hindsight, but for the most part the best we could hope for over about a 10 year period was league average.

And then obviously 2-3 of the absolute worst defenses in the team's history came during that period, so it's definitely been a long time coming.

The Parsons defenses are interesting to me because in hindsight it did seem like fool's gold when you look closely. Parsons is/was a transcendent player and covered up a lot, but I think the fact that we had high scoring offenses and such poor QB's/OL's in the division (Skins/Giants) really made them look better than they were. When games went a certain way (or when playing poor QB's/OL's) and Parsons could be completely unleashed things looked amazing, but obviously they were very hit or miss against balanced offenses/better teams and in closer games.

You even saw a lot of that with Quinn in 2024 with the Commandos, against weaker opponents and with big leads their pass rush feasted and got lots of big plays/turnovers. But then against better competition you could see the same warts.

2022 was the only time those Quinn/Parsons defenses really stepped up in critical moments late in the year and into the playoffs, aside from that they completely shit themselves at home in the playoffs in 2021 and 2023. Parsons and his particular strengths and weaknesses were really a microcosm of those defenses as a whole.

When he can do the one thing he's amazing at he's almost unstoppable, but the cracks start to show when teams could use a "whole team" concept to kind of mitigate his pass rush by keeping the game close and/or beating him up with the run.
 
Some great posts about our defense. That GB playoff game was a nightmare and really showed what a facade our defense was. It was apparent that it needed to be completely torn down and rebuilt with all new parts, and thankfully it's started now.
 
Simpleton said:
When he can do the one thing he's amazing at he's almost unstoppable, but the cracks start to show when teams could use a "whole team" concept to kind of mitigate his pass rush by keeping the game close and/or beating him up with the run.
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I do think Parsons sort of was propping up a bad defense to look good. This defense was already one of the worst when Micah wasn't on the field. I remember the stats backing that up when Parsons was negotiating his contract. My hope is now we are a more well built defense that isn't basically relying on one man to sort of prop everything up. No question it is a totally different defense in terms of scheme and players. You look at the defensive roster and since Micah left it looks completely different. Other than a couple of carry over players like Bland, Overshown and Hooker it's all new guys. Now we just have to see if all those new guys can kind of fit together and play well.
 
Stars said:
Some great posts about our defense. That GB playoff game was a nightmare and really showed what a facade our defense was. It was apparent that it needed to be completely torn down and rebuilt with all new parts, and thankfully it's started now.
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Yea, some of that could've been that Quinn had one foot out the door but in general we definitely needed to rethink how the defense was built and it would've been difficult to do that foundationally if Parsons was being paid 40/year.

Of course they would've given him 40/year if the agent had gone along with whatever gentleman's agreement Jerry/Parsons had, so I think a good amount of this has been dumb luck and happenstance, but knowing what I know now (plus Parsons popping an ACL) I definitely wouldn't reverse the Parsons trade even if I could.
 
Cowboysrock55 said:
I do think Parsons sort of was propping up a bad defense to look good. This defense was already one of the worst when Micah wasn't on the field. I remember the stats backing that up when Parsons was negotiating his contract. My hope is now we are a more well built defense that isn't basically relying on one man to sort of prop everything up. No question it is a totally different defense in terms of scheme and players. You look at the defensive roster and since Micah left it looks completely different. Other than a couple of carry over players like Bland, Overshown and Hooker it's all new guys. Now we just have to see if all those new guys can kind of fit together and play well.
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The biggest thing I appreciate about what Parker is doing is the insistence on having road-grader run-stuffers on the interior DL.

Jettisoning Osa and signing Ogbonnia, Bullard and drafting Overton was partially financial, but I think it was more philosophical than anything. Parker wants interior DL who can basically 2-gap, they're calling it "1 and a half gaps", but once you get past the semantics he wants some big fat fuckers who can square up and hold the POA. He doesn't want guys constantly shooting gaps and hunting upfield penetration.

The fatal flaw with Quinn is that everything was oriented towards rushing the passer and getting upfield. He loved the leaner, upfield types, not that dissimilar from Marinelli, and stuffing the run with stronger, less explosive guys like Hankins felt like an afterthought whereas Parker is actively hunting those types to fill out the roster.
 
boozeman said:


It is kind of weird but it appears the defensive coaches like have a plan and are working on next level things.

Well, they had nowhere to go but up.
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I think Eberflus was just checked out mentally after getting raked over the coals in Chicago, and then trading Parsons killed whatever hope we might've had for a half decent defense.

I don't know if these guys are legitimately good or not, but I think Eberflus has one foot into retirement so anything has to be better than that.
 
Simpleton said:
I think Eberflus was just checked out mentally after getting raked over the coals in Chicago, and then trading Parsons killed whatever hope we might've had for a half decent defense.

I don't know if these guys are legitimately good or not, but I think Eberflus has one foot into retirement so anything has to be better than that.
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Eberflus a limp dick who got thrown a bone by Jones and I am convinced he was in the dark about trading Parsons and then he had to make do. I have no love for him, but you cannot say he was put in a position to succeed.
 
boozeman said:
Eberflus a limp dick who got thrown a bone by Jones and I am convinced he was in the dark about trading Parsons and then he had to make do. I have no love for him, but you cannot say he was put in a position to succeed.
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Yeah, no way with the personnel we had. Darren Woodson said in an interview the other day that Dallas hasn’t gotten lined up correctly on defense consistently in years. This is an institutional, cultural problem combined with little on-field leadership and accountability and even less talent.

The DC needs to bring passion and generals in the field who mirror his message and who can be coaches in the moment.

We just don’t do defense. We throw some talented folks out there and hope for the best. We lack a true team that plays well together and helps each other succeed
 
Simpleton said:
I think Eberflus was just checked out mentally after getting raked over the coals in Chicago, and then trading Parsons killed whatever hope we might've had for a half decent defense.

I don't know if these guys are legitimately good or not, but I think Eberflus has one foot into retirement so anything has to be better than that.
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He checked out before he ever came to Dallas. Everything out of Chicago pretty well backed it up. We lacked talent but we lacked a coordinator too.
 
ravidubey said:
Yeah, no way with the personnel we had. Darren Woodson said in an interview the other day that Dallas hasn’t gotten lined up correctly on defense consistently in years. This is an institutional, cultural problem combined with little on-field leadership and accountability and even less talent.

The DC needs to bring passion and generals in the field who mirror his message and who can be coaches in the moment.

We just don’t do defense. We throw some talented folks out there and hope for the best. We lack a true team that plays well together and helps each other succeed
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This is all true but a player like Downs is one of the best possible guys to have to turn that around.
 
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