Jimmy Williams Taking Chris Crocker's Job

As a very drunk yet wise man once said, "one man's knee discomfort is another man's chance to seize the starting safety job".

It looks like Jimmy Williams and defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer are getting along wonderfully, spending days in the park together while talking about their feelings. On the outside looking in is Chris Crocker, whose knee discomfort forces him to watch them through a telescope and mumble like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Now that I've made you all very uncomfortable, the skinny here is that Crocker's probably out of a job. The coaching staff has given every indication that Williams was going to get the best chance to win the job. He's got better range and has a lot more upside at the position, and Crocker was at best slightly above average last year. It's also instructive to note that Crocker wasn't the only poor bastard getting burned on long TDs last year, but he did seem to be in the area on almost every one of them. His only chance to seize the job was to impress early, and his mysterious knee discomfort is going to keep him from doing that. Stick a fork in Chris Crocker.

This does mean the Falcons have a motley crew of inexperienced, ineffective and old guys in their secondary, which is unsettling. DeAngelo Hall should be solid, but Chris Houston is inexperienced and Lewis Sanders is a nickel back, plain and simple. It doesn't help that Williams is learning a new position at the same time that Lawyer Milloy is slowly decaying next to him. If Williams and Houston seize jobs and go nuts, this could be a pretty nice secondary. The alternative is probably a pretty excruciating season of pass defense, so fans of Jason Webster may not notice that much of a difference. I do have a lot of confidence that Jimmy can do good things at safety, but it'd be insane to think he starts off playing mistake-free football. I do think he'll have the job locked up by the second week or so of the preseason games.