The bolded part is exactly what Quinn is trying to do; he even said as much recently. Something along the lines of needing to make sure you have the personnel to line up and play big boy smash-mouth football if a team wants to do that, but then also be able to put the players on the field versus teams that want to go pass heavy. That's one of the things that made Seattle's D so good for so many years.The year Seattle pounded Denver in the Super Bowl - Denver obviously was pass happy and spread them out requiring more DB's on the field. But a lot of people don't remember the team they had to beat in the NFC championship game, San Francisco, was at that time was still using a power running offense.
Versus San Fran, they ran a lot of 46 Bear fronts, and their favorite front the 4-3 Under, but with a twist. They flipped the normal sides of both the LEO and the 5-tech DE, and pulled the traditional LEO in favor of the bigger DE Bennett into that spot. They went big boy football and barely played any nickel at all. But the following week, a few guys that played almost the whole game versus San Fran barely even saw the field versus Denver. They played almost exclusively nickel and dime defenses and pounded the snot out of both S.F. and Denver using two vastly different defensive schemes and several different personnel.
So yeah, that is what Quinn is coming from and also trying to achieve here. We aren't quite there yet, but Quinn is definitely working towards having a flexible defense that can defend anyone, anywhere, anytime.
The same reason Green Bay's defense looked great against Seattle, but struggled against our offense -- talent. Talent still wins in the NFL. Teams that have the talent to be strong power running teams are going to give every defense more of a challenge than those that don't have the same level of talent. We don't have a greater weakness against running offenses than we do passing offenses; we have a weakness against talented offenses - just like most every other defense. We didn't exactly struggle against the Bears on defense, we just didn't dominate like I would like to have seen. Plus it was week 1, where if you're smart you don't pay much attention to week 1 results because they are incredibly fluky and unpredictable.
