Been a long, long time.
I think our DB philosophy has been screwed up for a long time. I'm not particularly happy with Marinelli's performance this season, but at least he (and Kiffin) brought forth a more modern day CB philosophy of zone corners and zone coverage with man-to-man principles which requires bigger CB's that can tackle. Since the league basically allows illegal pick plays, you're not going to get as much pressure because the QB is getting the ball out of their hands in less than 2 seconds. So, you need physical corners than can jam and more importantly...tackle.
For years we were still living in the 90's with 'cover corners' who are meant to play man-to-man and go deep with WR's and we got killed for it.
Now the problem is that we still have an old school philosophy with safeties with Church playing more of a traditional in-the-box strong safety role and Wilcox (who I like) playing the hard hitting FS role. As much as I like Wilcox, I think we need much more range at FS and obviously more at SS. And you need these safeties to be darn good in today's game because they have so much more responsibilities with covering big, athletic TE's, WR's and RB's. So until we can get our safeties to perform well (and stay healthy), I don't see us having a reliable defense.
YR
