Patrick Graham will be coordinating a defensive unit that comes with some of the highest expectations in the league this season. A lot of his players are young and the majority are still trending upwards in their NFL careers.
In an appearance last week on the The Rush with Maxx Crosby, Graham was asked to name a player that he thinks will make a huge stride this year.
His answer was one that shouldn’t surprise anybody that watched the Raiders last year.
“I don’t want to put anybody on the spot, but I just love what Malcolm [Koonce] has been able to do,” Graham said.
“In terms of what he was able to do last year and the way he’s working right now. I think he could care less what happened last year. He’s just like Maxx, you have to do every week, every year, it’s a new season,” Graham continued. “The way he’s been working, the maturity in terms of him growing into himself as an NFL player and knowing who he is and being able to communicate that and execute it. It should be fun to watch. I’m not going to predict this and that. I just know this. Show me you’re doing the work. We’ll see what the results are. Let’s rock. He’s putting in that work.”
Looking back to last year, it was a tale of two seasons for Koonce.
Under Josh McDaniels, he played only 23.5 snaps per game, with 30 snaps being his highest single-game snap total. With Antonio Pierce, Koonce averaged 34.7 snaps per game, and he averaged 41 snaps per game in the final five games of the season.
Sacks are the metric that everyone follows with edge rushers, and Koonce didn’t record a single sack in 8 games under McDaniels last year.
In 9 games with Pierce as the interim coach, Koonce recorded 8 sacks.
Even when he wasn’t getting sacks in the second half of the season, Koonce was putting pressure on opposing quarterbacks. Pro Football Focus credited Koonce with 14 pressures under McDaniels (8 games) and 38 pressures under Pierce (9 games).
Seven times last year Pro Football Focus gave Koonce a game grade of 70.0 or higher. Six of those games came after Pierce was promoted, and three of those games Koonce received games grades better than 91.0
x: @raidersbeat
Good for Koonce! Let’s Goooo!
That is all fine n dandy n i understand the team as a whole playing better with Pierce at the helm, but in reading this i fail to understand how a defensive player who had the same defensive coordinator coach all year did not play good for that coach because of the head coach but then played extremely better under new head coach.
If that is true then it matters very little who the defensive coordinator was, but that cant be true because Max Crosby gets his no matter who the head coach is. It just confuses this article n ones perspective