The sam backer is generally the lighter quicker backer who draws coverage of the TE and sometimes a back or slot guy. His skillset looks good to me for that position in what limited time Ive seen him. Obviously you'd like someone strong against the run also, but in the real world you tend to have guys that are better at this or that. Teams don't tendency their runs to the strong side like they used to do though and pass catching TES are in vogue with every team but Muschimp's.
Think Brian Crum as prototypical Sam --and under rated Imo. Neiron has been excellent playing sam. Our most famous recent Sam backer, Jevon Kearse, was actually quite poor at the position. He wasn't particularly good against the run and was terrible in pass coverage. He was a blitzing mofo though, thats why the moved him to 4-3 weak end in the pros.
The other "rules" are that the mike is your best run stuffer and probably the biggest. (I'd expect this to be Anzalone soon.) Will is the other "middle" backer in most schemes. Sam is usually up on the line or at least closer. Will backer-- think Earl Everett or Jelani-- is usually a bit faster than the mike bc he has more coverage duties. Of course not every scheme is the same and we are adopting a new 4-3 base.
Also, kids don't come from molds and sometimes you end up with a Mike Taylor or Antonio who really aren't big enough to be a great run stoppers and aren't fast enough to cover. (Love Taylor. He plays bigger and faster than he is, but he is physically limited. Antonio is a big hitter but also limited in coverage ability and size. He also seems to have gap responsibility issues. It looks great if you guess correctly and jump the right gap but looks like a long run if you don't.)
I didn't notice McMillan to be weak against the run but I wasn't watching that closely and frankly only noticed him a few times. The ill-informed sometimes think that the first person to arrive at a receiver is the one who got burned. It isn't the case. In today's Saban- inspired zone defenses, the backers have more roles than simply dropping to a certain depth and flapping their arms like most of us did in middle school if we played zone at all.
Generally, the backer first is expected to disrupt the seam route first, usually with contact, then the curl or crosser, then the flat, in a matchup type zone using basketball terminology (basketball thin ice for me). There are probably other schemes but that's the general
very basic Saban scheme as I understand it. Here's a decent link but understand that this is just some basic info regarding one page of a thousand page playbook.
https://www.dawgsbynature.com/2013/8/...verage-part-ii
Some teams remove the mike from the field in the nickle, some remove the sam. I thought I saw us removing Taylor (the slowest) and the sam moving inside. Or maybe our terminology is that the sam is removed, Antonio moved to mike and the sam moved to will. Same difference.
The announcer highlighted this to an extent noting if Taylor was on the field on a passing down, expect zone coverage. If a lighter sam backer is moved inside, presumably the coaches expect pass. If it instead ends up being a run, it's to be expected that the outside backer might struggle more with the second level blocks from the C or G.
That's my take, fwiw.
