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Learn more at vertexinck.com. This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Great show for you guys today.

Earlier this week, we did the lessons that we

learned rewatching and studying the best offenses from 2022. Well, there's only one place we can go from

there. Today is the defensive edition of that show. We're going to do the lessons that we have

learned from watching, studying, rewatching the best defenses from last season here to help help me do that, two wonderful guests. First of all, it's my good friend, Nate Tyson. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing well. You said there's only one way to go with this. I was about to cut you off and go special teams. That's what we're going to go with. But no, talk about the defenses, of course. By the way, how to throw this little factoid in there that I found when we were doing the study of Super Bowl champions and the roster makeups was, I believe it was the 2016 Patriots. I think that's what it was at the top of my head. Only team to have the first and second team special teams all pro on their team, Matthew Slater and Nate Ebner. Sorry, I had to throw that fact I didn't tweet it. Maybe that's the secret sauce that we've been missing. Maybe that's what we should have tabbed into a little bit more. You need an all to all pro special teamer. I mean, if you look at those old Patriots teams, there's correlation there. That's got to be the correlation. I'm just saying, I think that's just having it all the all pro special teams guy every single year for two decades. Yeah. But then get the second team in that one year,

so they had both on that one season. So I thought that was pretty interesting. But other than that, doing great, you got to see my one gallon water bottle before this show. It was a delight in the pre show. I took a picture of it just in case I ever need that. Just like throw it out there. I'm still happy I bought that. That was a nice surprise for myself. It was an early birthday present for myself. So I was very happy again, a nice surprise. Forgot I ordered it. And it came in the mail. Great. Awesome. Love it. But doing very well. It's June 29th. I think that at some point over the next couple weeks, we may be dry enough in terms of content where we can try out the, was Matthew Slater the real cause of the Patriots dynasty? It's not Belichick. It's not Brady. It's actually Matthew Slater. So we're getting there. Ideas come from everywhere. We're getting there. Ideas come from everywhere. Also joining us today, thrilled to have him on for this discussion. Not sure we could have this discussion properly without having him on the show from the athletic. It's our guy, Deante, how you doing, bud?

The only. for this discussion. Not sure we could have this discussion properly without having him on the show

from the athletic. It's our guy, Deontzee Lee. Deonté, how you doing, bud? The only note I have on that

conversation is I don't know if there's any friend I have who was attacked like adults parenting

more aggressively than Nate Tice. That hydration machine that we'll call that water, that water

jug is just more confirmation of that fact. It's a new leaf. A new leaf I've turned. And it's been wonderful, but I am, I'm full-blown dad mode. I've gotten so many new clothes. My whole wardrobe's already changed. I've aged 10 years and 10 months. All right, before we get started, and we're going to let Deonti kick this off with his first

lesson.

Just for context, we didn't do this on the offensive show.

I thought it might be useful to do it here.

Here are the 10 top defenses from the last season by weighted DVOA, which is what Nate

...