Bryant McFadden: A Closer Look at His Lone Season in Arizona

statman.

I am itching to see McFadden hit the field in B&G again. I also home rumors are true that he is going to be challenged heavily for the starting position. That is only good news for the secondary as a unit.

Never thought about it that way. makes a lot of sense, since a strong pass rush helps the secondary. I agree that age may be a problem, but Big Snack seems to be in the best shape he has been in since…well…a long time. Smith is healthy again, he is a year older, but since he missed most of last year, that should help some this year. Hopefully Ziggy and Harris can step up and provide some quality snaps. Oh yeah…this is about B-mac..it is great to have him back, i did not think we shoudl have let him go, but oh well. Hope that the news that Lewis is pushing for his spot he plays with a chip and plays even better than our SB season. Looking forward to the start of the season!!!

to have a better year than gay did. And if he doesn’t I think we’ll see a lot of lewis.

on 3rd and 5 will be a thing of the past with B-mac…Hopefully

B-Mac will be back to his old self when the season starts…Whiz just didn’t use him to his peak and that’s why they gave him back to us for a low discounted price…hey I really don’t care, “Getting burnt all day” Willie Gay is terrible, I still don’t know why this guy is on the team…maybe to play coverage in nickle packages who knows…lol!!!

One thing with the Cardinals pass rush is that it took blitzes to get a lot of those sacks. Bill Davis did a good job creating some blitz schemes but it was tough to get pressure without blitzing partially because of how old some of the linebackers are getting. I think that we were in the top 5 for most blitzes called. Over at RotB most of us agreed that McFadden fit the system in Pittsburg than he did here, and we do think that Greg Toler can fit in with DRC and give us two good Coverage Cornerbacks.

Another thing is that McFadden was usually covering the #2 receiver when he was here, and I believe that he was the #3 Cornerback with the Steelers.

The Cardinals OLBs didn’t produce. I don’t think the sack numbers are so much a reflection of scheme as they are simply a lack of production from an older linebacker crew. The Cardinals have been investing in youth at the position but last year only Will Davis spent much time on the field. Cody Brown, last year’s 2nd round pick, missed the season with a wrist injury. This year they’ve brought in Joey Porter who while older still had a higher individual sack total in limited play with the Dolphins than any member of the Cardinals defense. He’ll be the mentor, along with Haggans, for all the young guys they now have which includes rookie O’brien Schofield and former CFL sack leader Stevie Baggs as well as Davis and Brown. Berry and Okeafor are gone. Hopefully we’ll see better sack numbers in 2010.

The sacks that the Cardinals defense did produce were in large part due to blitzing. They were not able to generate much pressure with a 3 or 4 man pass rush. Adding a dominant edge rusher to the defense is something all Cardinal fans are hoping comes out of this off season. Drafting Dan Williams at NT should also impact in a big way, freeing up Campbell and Dockett for even more production.

The Cardinals are still building the defense for the 3-4 scheme. Last season was the first that they predominantly ran it. Before that it was very much a hybrid. As the personnel comes more into place expect to see more similarity to what is going on in Pittsburgh. Aside from a shaky situation with the depth at CB, I think most of the folks at ROTB are pretty happy with how the defense is shaping up. Especially after how rough the off season started for us. Damage control was handled well.

I know I remember my own reaction (and the reactions of several on this site) in thinking there’d be very little drop-off between him and Gay.

There was a decent amount of evidence to back that perspective up. Gay hadn’t just performed spot duty in the 2008; he started 4 games as our #2 behind Ike when McFadden and then Deshea were injured, and even after McFadden returned from injury he saw significant action in the late weeks/playoffs part of the season, even rotating him in with a healthy McFadden and Townsend covering #2 receivers every few series. This Post-Gazette article speaks to how highly the coaching staff though of his performance late in the season.

I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember many of the more stat-oriented people on this website talking about Gay leading the league in some key metric that Football Outsiders used to calculate the effectiveness of cornerbacks. I, like many others, bought into the hype and expected big things from him this season, and I was sorely disappointed.

So it’s worth asking: why did William Gay look so bad this year, and why did the secondary as a whole look so much worse a year after leading the league in pass defense? Was it simply, as many have suggested, a byproduct of Gay being on the field every down, of quarterbacks getting a year of tape on him and exploiting his physical limitations? Was it the lack of good, experienced, capable nickel corners backing him up? Was it nothing more than Troy’s absence?

I’m no expert, but many of these explanations ring hollow.

My concern is that Gay’s bad performance in 2009, and really a bad performance by the whole secondary, might have something to do with the front seven, or worse yet, LeBeau’s schemes not evolving quite as far as they needed to. I’m not a football expert, and I don’t know that I’m the best person to evaluate this hypothesis, but I feel like the comparison between McFadden’s 2008 year with the Steelers and his 2009 year with the Cardinals might not tell the whole story when evaluating his performance this coming year?

After all, LeBeau’s hallmark has always been making mediocre corners look great with his schemes and a talent-laden front seven. Yet Gay, a guy that looked great in four starts and significant additional playing time in 2008, looked awful this season, and his comrades (Ike and Clark , included) didn’t fare much better after having excellent performances just a season ago. I’m not sure I buy into the rationale that the rest of the Steeler’s defense and the scheme they run can compensate for McFadden’s limited skills in coverage and help him have a stellar year. It just strikes me that Gay, Burnett and Townsend would have performed better in that role in 2009 were that the case.

I’m not coming to a conclusion here, because I haven’t done a lot of analysis on the front seven’s performance on passing downs in 2009, but I wouldn’t be surprised if McFadden’s performance doesn’t signal a return to dominance for himself or the Steelers defense.

Somebody more knowledgeable should convince me I’m wrong, because being optimistic about 2010 is way more fun.

Really? You wrote all that about the difference between b-fad’s steelers/cardinals flip flopping? He got the money and simply went lazy last year. that about sums it up. There is nothing much really to point out. the cardinals saw the writing on the wall and decided to get rid of him. Hope I was able to clear that up for everyone!

Sorry I missed most of the discussion. The main question I would ask is how many QB pressures did the Steelers have in 2009? Although the sack total was not much lower than the previous year, if the number of QB pressures dropped, that would also account for some of Gay’s issues. It seems that the FO thought so as they heavily targeted depth at OLB and STs players in this draft, in addition to bringing back so many former players who should still be able to contribute, especially Foote and B-Mac.

… because it’s a business, after all. And McFadden, Randle El, Leftwich make this a better, deeper Steelers team. Obviously there was a great need for Byron to play QB, but I hated the thought of Foote ending his career on the lowly Lions. No one can look good in the morass that is Washington, and Randle El was no exception. I always have rooted for Leftwich since he basically lost his Jaguars job because he broke an ankle.