j rake could you do a breakdown of del rio's performances as Dcoord?
i generally think he is solid, but i don't know enough to be honest.
evaluating NFL coaches is really hard. the league is basically designed to not let any team, or any particular unit, dominate for a prolonged period of time. if you have the best record, you get the worst pick, and you play a 1st-place divisional schedule. if you stink, you get a great pick, and a last-place schedule. so it becomes harder on the best teams, easier on the worst teams, and in the end they end up in the middle. if you draft a stud, then you have to pay him, and then you have to get rid of your good players. if you draft complete crap, you won't have to pay them, and now you can overspend on impact free agents. if your offense is really good, but your defense isn't, you allocate more of your cap space to the struggling unit; but then your offense takes a hit (and vice versa).
finally in coaching, if you have short-term failure, the head coach is getting fired and a new staff comes in. if you sustain success, the coordinator gets promoted to head coach by another team and the new guy steps in. other than the pats, who are consistently in the top 3rd of the league defensively under belichick, i'd be curious to know which coordinators have sustained anything close to consistent top-10 defenses year after year. i have to think the list is a very short one.
the fact is, no coordinator was going to have the 2018 chiefs playing top-10 level defense. i'd have to scroll back up, but i believe they played half of their games against top-10 level offenses (pats twice, chargers twice, rams, etc.). the chiefs would have been a top-10 level defense (unadjusted stats, of course) if they got to play the same schedule as the colts. but they didn't. and i find it funny that mellinger acts so surprised that this chiefs D performed so poorly - he himself stated in a preseason column that he thought the chiefs defense didn't do enough to address its personnel shortcomings BY CHOICE! in mellinger world, this season was all about building for
next season.
here's mellinger on the chiefs D as a whole in a column from five months ago:
The truth is the Chiefs’ defense probably had too many holes to fix all in one offseason, but certain circumstances also played against them.
here's mellinger on the secondary (which lost sorensen to injury early in the year, berry for essentially the entire year after he published it, and also watts):
The roster is full of “development guys,” particularly in the secondary — corners Charvarius Ward and Tremon Smith, safety Jordan Lucas and to a slightly lesser extent Armani Watts. The Chiefs will have an extra second-round pick next year, and will likely draft at least one cornerback high.
here's mellinger on the pass rush, which he thought would be bad but was actually league-best:
If that’s the way it goes, the biggest concern going forward could be the pass rush.
so to recap: mellinger thought the chiefs D didn't address its personnel shortcomings as part of a strategic plan to build toward 2019, he thought the pass rush was the biggest concern, and he thought the secondary was full of development guys. well, here on earth, most of us know that if you play a hard offensive schedule with an apparent pass-rush lacking defense with a developmental secondary and injuries to your star players (houston missed four games, berry missed 14), then you probably won't perform well! and by standard metrics, the chiefs D did not play well (though i will remind that they were exactly average using weighted DVOA by season's end.)
bottom line, i don't think sutton was as good as the stats suggested early in his tenure, and i don't think he was as bad as these last two years indicate. i suspect the same is likely true with jack del rio or spags or countless other defensive coordinators, including gregg williams (whose defensive units have been far more up-and-down than i think most realize.)