One-and-done defensive standouts
 

Okay, fess up -- how many of us worked poor Zack Swift into the ground as our MLB?

1,246 tackles here, with basically one season missed due to injury.

Swift was my starter, but he didn't have gaudy numbers, mainly due to Brandon Beyer having a great career at OLB, and Sammie Carr holdin' it down at DT. Beyer had six season of 60+ tackles--very solid for OLB, and Carr had as many as 80 in a year at DT.

Well, my team was generally rotten, and the defense was worse than that... so Swift was pretty much the one-eyed-man in my land of the blind. Helps explain the big numbers.

CB Robbie Ramon got like 5000 picks for me as a CB.

57 to be exact

I didn't have Swift, but I had a SS Lee Kinney (he was a FS originally) who had over 1000 tackles on my pitiful defense. My star standout was DE Brody (originally a DT). He finished with almost 80 sacks for me, and was a fa pickup. I love finding those pure pass rushing DTs and moving them to DE. They usually even gain a little ability in those skills when moved to DE.

Zach Swift and Lincoln Murray had 933 and 895 tackles respectively for me.

Swift was a bit of an afterthought for me... I think I grabbed him with my last draft pick, 7.27, but he had a nice steady career never having less than 70 tackles in any season and topping out at 105 with no awards. He is still active (30/30) at the end of the dynasty. Murray was picked at 3.14 and had a similar career winning 1st team OLB in 2017.

DEs Vince Schmidgall (2.28) and Allen Whalen (2.18) made provided a solid pass rush with 105 sacks (5.9 PR%) and 91 sacks (5.8 PR%). DT Marcus Danek (1.16) anchored the front seven finished 3rd in tackles and sacks with 562 tackles and 79 sacks (4.8 PR%) and winning back to back 1st team DT honors in 2017 and 2018... he's still very good too -- 56/56.

FS Trevor Gomez (URFA) was probably my best DB finishing with 52 ints (2nd in league history) and an 83.2 PD%. LCB Bo Granados (1.17) was a huge bust despite having nice ratings most of his career... 9 ints and a 79.5 PD%. RCB Roderick Barker (3.29) ended up being much better with 27 ints and a 80.8 PD%.

I got Schmidgall at 2(22), and had no other solid pass rusher. He ended up with 94 sacks and 168 hurries, good for a 7.6 PRPtc.

Another after-draft guy worth mentioning -- after frittering his talents away at SLB for a couple of seasons, I moved LB Emmitt O'Neal to play the 3-4 blitzbacker and he became an al-pro for us. I still don't really know much about how well the 3-4 defense works overall, but I'm guessing that O'Neal as an undrafted rookie who can land 10+ sacks and a PR% over 8 makes up for the difficulty of landing bona fide pass rushers without using a ton of top tier draft capital there.