Excellent post.
I’m not incredibly worried about this whole zone thing right now either, especially if the Browns front four can stay healthy and is able to generate the kind of pressure most expect.
I do think people hear the word “zone” and collectively default their thought process to “all 6-8 players who aren’t rushing the passer are playing a soft area of the field and letting receivers run free around them” and that’s not really accurate.
There are ways, in essence, play man and zone at the same time as
@jking948 so eloquently laid out.
Two other random thoughts for me when thinking about Wilks...
1. As much as we want to believe that all coaches should adapt to their personnel and not make their personnel adapt to them, I think it's time to accept the fact that the vast majority of football coaches are simply not good enough to do this. Only the truly elite coaches like Belichick are able to no questions asked adapt what they want to do to the personnel they have. Guys who are capable of doing that almost immediately become head coaches and typically don't stop being head coaches.
A guy like Steve Wilks has coached in a 4-3 with heavy zone and heavy blitz concepts for essentially his entire NFL career. It's completely unrealistic to expect him in his 14th season in the NFL to just completely abandon the style that made him an attractive coaching candidate in the first place in favor of a dramatically different style simply based on the personnel at his disposal.
2. Shame on the Cardinals for hiring Wilks to be their coach in the first place. They knew what scheme he had been running his entire professional career. They knew the personnel he was about to inherit didn't fit that style, but they didn't make enough significant roster to give him the kind of players he would need to make his preferred scheme work. THEN they fired him after a year and had the audacity to say "He made some big errors. Going from a 3-4 to a 4-3, we were the sixth overall defense, and we went backward in a lot of ways. We did not expect that, I did not expect that. I did not expect the change, either."
The fuck? Maybe Wilks lied through his teeth in his interview, but shame on the Cardinals for not doing recognizing that if it happened, or at the very least not doing their due diligence before hiring the guy in the first place.