To elaborate on the theme of the last sentence, this is why I don't understand the whole "Baker was just running Manny's defense" argument. Yes it's the same general system but the DC who is running the show and calling the defense can pick and choose any aspect of the defense to accentuate or to minimize. You can have 2 different coordinators each with a different philosophy running their own defense from the same playbook. The defenses and the results would be very different. The same principle applies to the topic above about Baker running Manny's defense. Some will say that Bakers results sucks because it was Manny's defense. I completely disagree with that.
Over the last 2 years it became quite apparent that Baker was far more conservative in the way he called the defense. Baker liked to play super soft on the back end and he was very zone heavy. Diaz on the other hand has that zone in his playbook and he did use it but overall was much more aggressive in his philosophy and the way he called the defense. With Diaz once again at the controls and the addition of elite coaches like Simpson, T. Rob and Shoop, I think we can expect our defense to look very different from what we saw last year. I expect to be much more downhill in terms of aggression with more gap integrity and tight man coverage mixed in. Im also expecting some different wrinkles defensively with many sub packages used to press the freak individual mismatches we can create with some of our players(Chase Smith, James Williams, Avantae Williams, Tyrique Stevenson and Leonard Taylor).
