Teams place premium of those w/ 304 skills

[Partial]

http://www.jsonline.com/sports/packers/43494247.html

[Lurker64]

I think the tenor of the article was sort of misleading. Yes, there are more teams that are running the 3-4 than there have been, so that makes it so there's more demand on 3-4 players than there was otherwise and so some guys will go earlier than they would in earlier drafts. However, it fails to address the question as to whether or not 3-4 personnel is easier to come by than 4-3 personnel, and personally I think it is.

The major flaw in the 4-3 defense from a personnel perspective is that in order to be a good you basically need freaks of nature to play defensive end, as you need a guy who can both rush the passer effectively and is stout at the point of attack, and for most people those are largely unrelated skills. It's hard to find 4-3 DEs and it's expensive to keep them. On the other hand, if you're looking for the analogous role in the 3-4 defense, it's going to be easier to find a 250 lb athletic man to rush the passer than to find a 280 lb athletic man to rush the passer, since God just made more of the 250 lb guys. You don't need a freak of nature at end, since you don't need your outside guys to be able to hold the point on the outside in the running game.

Similar comparisons can be made with the need for instinctive cover LBs (the 4-3 needs 3 of them, the 3-4 needs 2 of them), and the only position where the 3-4 seems really harder to find guys for is the NT spot, since those guys are rare, but they are specialists. It's always going to be easier to find a guy who's really good at one thing, than to find a guy who's really good at two, largely unrelated things.

Plus, I mean, the Packers are scrabbling with 11-12 other 3-4 teams for resources, but isn't that still preferable to scrabbling with 20 4-3 teams for resources? Particularly when it's very rare that there's a player who's good in the 4-3 and not good in the 3-4 (but the converse is often true)?

[Noodle]

Good point about the difficulty of finding a true, 3-down DE for the 4-3. Kampy is good, but I think he wears down. We've been trying for years to get a compliment on the right DE, and you've seen how well that's gone.

Makes you appreciate even more the wicked skill set that Reggie brought to the table. Not likely to see that again any time soon.