Fourth best isn’t bad, but besides Mack’s nine sacks he had two others wiped out by penalty, another wiped out in postseason by penalty and did all this despite appearing on the injury report 10 weeks without missing a game.
Maybe it was a special teams coordinator, who would know about as much as your average fantasy football owner about pass rushing.
Tampa Bay threw together a secondary with Carlton Davis, Sean Murphy-Bunting, Antoine Winfield Jr.
A Pro Bowl alternate two years ago when he had to hold down the fort without Akiem Hicks for three-quarters of a season, no one is 100% certain he’ll be available after opting out in 2020 but it does appear this way.
Hicks appears no less physical and imposing than he did three years ago, and Tampa Bay’s Ndamukong Suh keeps showing interior defensive linemen can continue to be effective past 30.
The second half of last season represented a huge leap forward for the fifth-round 2018 pick as four of his career-best five sacks and eight of his 13 quarterback hits occurred then.
What also helped Mack in 2018 was having a defensive edge on the other side who was versatile enough so the two could flip-flop from one side of the line to the other.
His stats last year were far better than some of the inside linebackers ahead of him on Pro Bowl and All-Pro teams and he really only began to put this type of advanced play forth after the first quarter of the season.
Last year Trevathan initially was even poor against the run but some of this had to do with a lack of a proper nose tackle in front of the inside linebackers following Goldman’s opt-out.
Perhaps the bigger issue here is whether GM Ryan Pace actually did his homework before committing $33 million guaranteed to a one-dimensional, 4-3 pass rusher with two sacks and six quarterback hits last year.
Johnson is good percentage-wise when targeted because he is in his element in man coverage, but needs to continue improving his zone coverage greatly because this is the emphasis of the Bears defense.
He has avoided injury thus far, but the real work begins in camp and he hasn’t been able to avoid injury when the real play begins since 2018.
It’s going to be difficult for him to duplicate this, and it’s possible Desai’s defense could expose him to dangers that Chuck Pagano’s did not.
Having Gipson in the back of the secondary will help Jackson because he hasn’t had this type of familiarity of system and player to work alongside since Adrian Amos in 2018.