Monday, May 27, 2013

Scouting the 2013 NFL Draft: Bears Pick Khaseem Greene

Well, it's been a while, but I am still going to try to get through all the Bears draft picks with decent YouTube tape on them. For previous installments, you can learn more about Kyle Long here, and more about Jonathan Bostic here. Since the Bears had no third round pick, it is time to jump to the fourth round and look at Rutgers linebacker, Khaseem Greene. Greene was somebody I liked from the limited information I had about him, so I was excited about the pick and his chances to come in early and make an impact. The guy is a great athlete, and he was somebody who made a lot of plays in college, two things that get me very excited. I took a look at his game against Arkansas to get a better idea about his skills.

One thing that he seems to do well is reading the quarterback's eyes to recognize where he should be dropping in his zone. This is a good example of him using the quarterback's eyes to figure out where he should be going in his zone. 

It's a situation where he may have some peripheral sight of the wide receiver, but the big key is reading Tyler Wilson's eyes and cutting off that route. He closed down the passing lane and made Wilson throw the ball away.

Even though he was good in zone coverage, it is not a wise idea to line him up on the team's best receiver in man-to-man coverage
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He may be athletic, but, yeah, that's not the team's best decision. Also, the safety did a really poor job on that play. Coverage wise, he's solid but not totally smooth in turning his hips and running down the field. I still think he has the speed to handle responsibilities in most coverage schemes, just don't line him up on receivers with no help.

For the running game, he has some work to do. He does a good job of reading plays, but he can get swallowed up by blockers since he is not a huge linebacker. I would like to see him be stronger on contact. Also, he doesn't always do a good job of finishing his tackles. This is probably the most egregious example of that:

That's a tackle that you need to make, and it cost his team about eight yards.

In this game against Arkansas, he really struggled to read plays and attack the hole. He always seemed a little hesitant on making moves. On this play, he just badly misreads the play. He vacates the hole that the running back was looking for on the counter, and it leads to a huge gain by the offense.

Another issue he had in this game against Arkansas was diagnosing plays and attacking. He badly misreads this play, vacates the hole that the runner was looking for on the counter, and it leads to a big gain.



He moves to his right, but he isn't going to make a play on that side either way. Either he is just going to add to the pile, or the running back will try to break it outside on there. Instead, the running back cuts back to where Greene should have been and turns it into a first down. Greene is relatively new to linebacker, so it may be something that he can improve on, but right now, he is really just relying on pure athleticism to make plays.

One good thing that I saw a lot of was that he really tried to strip the ball from people when making tackles, which means he should fit in well with the rest of the Bears defense.

Overall, he is going to be a good coverage linebacker that has a good chance of at least getting third down snaps this year. His background as a safety really helps him there. Unfortunately, his lack of experience at linebacker could hurt him as he is just a split second slow at diagnosing plays. If he can improve that aspect of his game, he has the athleticism to be a solid outside linebacker.

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