I think a lot of people don't understand safety play because it can be more complicated than other positions depending on what the safety is required to do. You can't just see a receiver make a catch and assign blame to the safety because he's nearest or even see a safety fill the "wrong" gap against the run. Without knowing his assignments from play to play, it's easy to misevaluate.
Unless you have the ability to diagnose exactly what his responsibility was supposed to be on every play, the only way I know of to judge Jones is to watch how he handles assignments when he is one-on-one or when the back tries to go through the hole he is filling. For the most part, I see no problem with Jones' play in those situations.
Bryon plays a ton of man coverage and when they put him in zone it's either in a matchup zone or a 2 deep shell. 2 deep zone is pretty much passe these days and it doesn't allow the safety to make much in the way of plays compared to bracket coverage where the safety can actually do less actual covering and make big plays off an bad pass or a receiver tips a pass and the safety is there for the tip drill.
He's not at Earl Thomas' level...few are. But Thomas gets a lot more short zone coverage which allows him to make more interceptions.
The only bad plays I've seen from Byron watching All-22 in the past few games was the Jordy Nelson TD where the Packers were gashing Tyrone Crawford off the run and GB used play action and had a wide open Nelson for the TD. But everybody bit on the playfake because Crawford and M. Collins were so godawful in that game that GB was going to score. And the reception from Kittle. Byron uncharacteristically played that poorly as he should have diagnosed that Kittle was either going to go inside (which he did) or run a stop route.
Byron really saves us out there and I would surmise that he is to the defense very similarly to what Sean Lee is to this defense. Without him, we would be in massive trouble because he makes up for a lot of bad play from Heath and Frazier and greatly takes the load off in the pass game by being able to lock down on TE's, WR's and RB's.
And with that said, I wouldn't have a problem with him moving to corner next year if it was due to us finding a good SS, moving on from O-Scan and putting Woods at FS. That just goes to show how good and valuable Byron's flexibility is.
I can say with confidence that nobody in the NFL thinks that Byron is even an average safety. They think he's one of the top safeties in the entire league and he's have a better season than Landon Collins is at this point in time.
YR
