Now he isn't physical? Church has better short area explosion but he is not better breaking down on the run. Soft safeties get exposed like Heath and Ball did very recently. Wilcox doesn't get punked like that.
He's 24 years old. He is likely to continue to improve.
Things are up. My man Ken Bishop is working with the 1s and 2s with all the injuries and looking good. He's been using a sweet swim move. Here he is dishing it on Fred.
The things that Wilcox is being criticized for are actually the things that he does best.
1. He is plenty physical.
2. He is good in 1 on 1 coverage. He is good in the 1 on 1 drills. Everybody including CBs get beat by Witten at times in the drills, but in general Wilcox is good in this area.
His issues have all been related to taking the correct angles or how long to give help in 1 area of the field before switching over to give help in another area. In other words, any issues that he as had are mental, not physical.
Even the issue with angles is way overblown because if other defenders fail to play within the scheme then it screws the deep safety because he takes angles expecting the underneath defenders to cut off the path of the guy with the ball.
The 3rd CB (and sometimes 2nd CB) were way bigger issues last season than the play of the Safeties.
I hope people that are espousing opinions on Wilcox have studied the All-22. It is extremely difficult to evaluate Safeties just based on the broadcast footage.
Ken Bishop: It did seem that the guys in the actual scrimmage were the 3rd string guys or rookies and Bishop was not one of them. I took that to mean that he is more of a 2nd string player on the depth chart.