It certainly makes sense on paper. It will be interesting to see how they turn out.
As you know by now, the Jets picked two safeties in the 2021 draft (Jamien Sherwood and Hamsah Nasirildeen), and are moving them to linebacker.
Jets coach Robert Saleh is a big believer in the concept.
“It’s not traditional but what you can see out of those guys is the ability to read, diagnose, run, hit, play coverage, understand route concepts that are in front of them,” said Saleh. “So, we feel like they’ll be able to translate to linebacker pretty easily.”
Saleh feels Sherwood and Nasirildeen each playing a lot of box safety in college will help their transitions.
“When you’re a box safety, the reads are pretty much the same,” Saleh said.
And they won’t have to take on a lot of offensive linemen, like linebackers in a 3-4 defense often have to.
“The way they’ll learn the way we play at linebacker, it’s not a 3-4 Mike linebacker that goes and [takes on] the guard to get him off the tackle; that’s not the way we play,” Saleh said. “We play with a little more speed, fast flow. We try to put them in space and allow them to close that space as fast as possible, so those guys usually fit pretty good in our scheme.”
The Jets struggled with linebacker pass coverage in recent years, so Sherwood and Nasirildeen should help in this area.
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