Hello, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of Hawkblogger mornings in the afternoon.

I'm Brian Mhouser. You can find us on all the places, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, at HawkBlogger, audio, Apple, Podcast, Spotify, and of course, Patreon.com slash Hawkblogger for ad-free audio.

We're at Radio Row Day 4. And I got to say, it's a lot of blah, blah, blah at this point. Like, I'm ready for the game to go. And I was walking around Radio Row here. And I was like, I don't know if I even want to ask anyone to be a guest today because I don't know if there's anybody that is going to bring anything fresh to the conversation and actually be about football. And then I saw Greg Kosel standing there having a nice conversation. And I was like, oh, my God, if Greg can come over and we can talk football, there is nobody. I would rather have, Greg, we talked to the combine, but it's great to see you again. How are you doing? Doing great, Brian. How are you doing? I'm doing really well. I'm doing really well. We're getting closer and closer to this game. And

the hysteria is reaching higher and higher levels. I'm sure you saw the news last night about

Nikki Menmore getting a little bit of an ankle injury. Seahawks fans like fell out of their

chairs and every analyst out there was like, oh, this is going to completely change this game.

I saw him like a few hours ago. He was walking without a limp. Mike McDonald says he's going to play, low ankle sprain. So I'm curious. When you heard that news, how big did you think that potentially could be? And now with the updates, do you think it's news? Well, the way I think about it is probably the way the coaching staff did.

I thought, okay, what would change if he couldn't play?

You know, and the way I thought about it was, do they stay with sort of the same conceptual approach and bring Witherspoon inside, even though he's, you know, 30 pounds lighter?

Yep.

And then play just Wollin and Job outside.

Or do they then go with a 5-2 front as their base defense, which they've done at times this year, not as often lately, but they certainly can do do that.

Because the Patriots do play a lot with 6-0 linemen.

They do play with a fullback.

So the Patriots do line up in base personnel, you know, a meaningful percentage of the time.

So, you know, that's the way I thought about it.

I didn't necessarily think, oh, my God, what's going to happen?

I thought, let's think about now, you know, the way they'd have to think about it.

Yes.

And it's a unique situation. We talked about it with the Seax. It's not often that you have two of probably the top five nickel corners in football on the same team with Evan Witherspoon and Nikki Monroe. Well, it's funny you say that. Eminowry is really a Sam linebacker. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, they play what, you know, we call big nickel with three safeties, you know, which is very

much a trend in the league now. There's more players like that. But he's really a Sam linebacker who,

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