The case for moving Landon Collins to WLB signing another SS

[turtle28]

9 minutes ago, e16bball said:

Good catch on Randall. Super lame of him to do that to me.

I consider pass coverage to be both highly subjective (I don’t believe PFF accurately assigns coverage grades in many circumstances) and highly variable. Even they acknowledge that their scores for secondary players fluctuate dramatically from year to year. I think more than any other position aside from perhaps RB production, pass coverage is extremely dependent on other variables. Scheme, quality of pass-rush, ability to trust other players around you. A player’s outcomes in pass coverage are not just representative of his own ability — the same player may have better or worse outcomes depending entirely on variables beyond his control.

I agree with you that the eye test suggests that Collins is limited in coverage. I think as the safety closer to the LOS, he draws assignments that most safeties struggle with, in terms of man coverage against RBs, slot receivers, and receiving TEs. Not many safeties hold up well consistently in matchups like that. But he does have his limitations, and I agree he’s at his worst in deep halves or thirds. 
 

And for the record, I agree that we overpaid Collins. Just as I believe that we’ll soon see that we overpaid Fuller, as well. But you don’t win games by accumulating the highest “bang for your buck” score. Cap space doesn’t put points on the board — you need players. We have tons of the former, and precious few of the latter. If we’re paying some of our good players a couple/few million AAV more than we probably should, I’m at peace with that. And he is a good player. A very good one, though admittedly not a truly elite one as the contract suggests. We’re years away from any sort of cap crunch with this team, so the real-life opportunity cost of overpaying some guys for the next couple seasons is extremely low in my view.

Which, incidentally, is why I would have been fine with paying Cooper and/or Hooper what they wanted as well.