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It’s time for a helping of Website Whispers with some notes on the Jets signing of Dawan Landry and something on Tim Tebow . . .
The signing of free agent safety Dawan Landry makes sense on so many levels.
He knows Rex’s system from Baltimore. This can’t be minimized. In the NFL, familiarity breeds success.
And let’s not forget, he’s probably going to call the signals in the Jets’ secondary, so the fact that he’s already comfortable with the playbook, is huge.
Remember, with the new CBA, the spring and summer practice sessions have been cut down significantly. So the coaches can’t engage in as much teaching on the field as in the past. So Landry’s background in the system helps.
While he’s been away from Rex for four years, it shouldn’t take long for him to get back up to speed. He’s a smart guy – a Georgia Tech graduate.
Remember, he came into Baltimore as a rookie, a fifth rounder, and started immediately, hauling in five interceptions. He’s a quick study.
You also have to like his durability. He’s been in the league for eight years, and has played in every game seven of the eight seasons. In 2008, he suffered a really bad concussion trying to tackle Cleveland running back Jamaal Lewis, and missed the last 14 games.
He has really nice size for the position at 6-1, 217, and this helps him cover tight ends effectively.
He only has average speed, but he’s an instinctive player who often puts himself in good spots to make plays, which helps him deal with his pedestrian speed. While his brother, LaRon, is more physically gifted, Dawan seems to have the better instincts. Scouts will tell you that LaRon’s instincts in coverage are so-so.
Dawan Landry is also a good leader, which should help the Jets, a team that didn’t have much of that last year.
It’s really hard to find a lot wrong with this signing. He can still play at a high level. The reason Jacksonville
released him this off-season was that his cap figure was too high ($3.9 million) . . .
Manish Mehta reported today that the St. Louis Rams aren’t interested in trading for Tim Tebow.
You might be wondering why I’m bringing this up. It doesn’t seem like much of a story.
But there is more to this than meets the eye.
Last year, when Denver was shopping Tebow, St. Louis was interested – very interesting.
However, from what I hear, Tebow didn’t want to go there, and made that known behind the scenes.
He wanted New York. Not only was New York a great place for his marketing empire, but Mark Sanchez was viewed as vulnerable, coming off a poor season.
Little did he know, Rex Ryan had some kind of bizarre “fatal attraction” as I’ve called it in the past, for Sanchez, where it would practically take divine intervention for him to be replaced (and than when he finally replaced Sanchez, late in the season, perhaps due to orders from above him – he went with Greg McElroy).
Tebow made a mistake – he should have gone to St. Louis or Jacksonville, not New York. Whatever his role would have been with those teams, there wouldn’t have been the three-ring media circus around him – those are much smaller markets – much more conservative places.
And if he did go to Jacksonville, he probably would have played at some point for the struggling Blaine Gabbert.
But he didn’t want St. Louis or Jacksonville, he wanted New York, and that was a miscalculation on his part . . .
April 9, 2013
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