Unlike the stock market, Michael Boley is trending upward. Zing! I'd make quite the economic pundit, no?
But Boley's hopeful resurgence is much more important to us today than the fact that many of us are eating bowls of nails for breakfast. Boley rose from obscurity to become one of the league's most quietly feared linebackers, an anchor for a defense that desperately needed one. This year, the big plays he seemed to author nearly every week have been few and far between.
Enter Boley's bye week, where the AJC's D. Orlando Ledbetter discovers the linbacker basically watched a lot of football:
After players left the team facilities last Thursday, the linebacker wasn’t off to someplace like Aruba.
“I just hung around the house and watched the Carolina and New Orleans games,” Boley said. “I was just flip-flopping, back and forth, seeing what was going on around the league.”
The linebacking corps in general needs to improve, and later on in the article Keith Brooking dons his soothsayer hood and warns us all of our maybe possibly impending doom! Or something. I do know that this defense can't continue to save save us if they're incapable of defending the pass, barely adequate against the run and not very adept at getting turnovers. In my mind, any transformation has to begin with our greatest defensive strength, which is definitely our linebackers.
In a roundabout way, I'm trying to say that Michael Boley needs to become the soul-drinking leviathan that we have all come to expect him to be. If he can strike fear into offensive lines, that frees up Curtis Lofton and Keith Brooking, which in turn gives the line a little more slack and only helps the secondary. Perhaps I'm putting too much stock in him, but I do believe Boley can help bail this team out.
You can insert your own economic joke there.