Until we find pass rushers who can get in Brady's face over and over, we're never going to overtake the Patriots and win the AFC East.
Two thoughts.
1) Honestly, if you are building a team these days to stop Brady and Belichick then that is probably short-sighted. We don't know how much longer Brady will be effective, and if Garappalo takes over, he is a completely different kind of QB. Sure, Brady _wants_ to play into his 50's ... heck probably until he hits 75, but father time will decide, not Tom Brady. Building a team that can win is the thing to do. Win 10 games a year and it will become almost irrelevant whether we beat the Patriots. At 10 wins we will likely be in the playoffs every year, and that is really only 2 games better than the average coaches. Once we hit that mark we can look at our competition ... which may not even include Tom Brady by then.
2) If you truly want to build a team to beat Tom Brady, and I realize you are not alone in wanting this, then what we need is an elite FS, more elite CB's, and another elite penetrating DT in the mold of Suh. Here's why. At this stage of his career, Brady is throwing tons of dink and dunk plays. His OL looks better than it is because he gets the ball out so quickly. His receivers, like Edelman, run very short quick routes. They abuse CB's cushion and Tom Brady is extremely good at delivering those short passes on time and with precision. His accuracy is the most consistent in the NFL. He throws the pass before the rush can get to him.
If you watch the Super Bowl, at the beginning of the game the Falcons used this approach against the Patriots and shut them down. They clamped down on the short stuff and trusted their FS to prevent the bomb. It worked. While Brady completed some passes, he was unable to complete enough to string together any drives. Unfortunately, once the Falcons got that lead they backed off of this aggressive approach and started playing off the WR's, and all of a sudden Brady found his rhythm, completed nearly every pass because his receivers were almost always open, and started many mercilessly long drives down the field exhausting the Falcons defense and killing them with a "death by a thousand cuts" system of short passes. Then, in the 2nd half, the defense started getting so tired they were no longer capable of clamping down on those short routes effectively ... and the Patriots steamrolled them. Had the Falcons stuck to clamping down on those short receiving routes, the Falcons would have won in a blowout.
That is the same strategy that the Broncos and the Seahawks used successfully against Brady. It works. Things would be different if the Patriots had an in-prime Randy Moss ... but they don't. And IMHO, Branden Cooks isn't that guy despite his speed. The Broncos had 3 elite CB's to play tight man in the face of those receivers and clamp down on their short routes. They had a FS to cover over the top, and Miller and Ware bringing fantastic pressure to prevent longer drops and time for longer throws. Then they blitzed the A gap a lot too. The Seahawks used lockdown press CB's to clamp down on the short routes and excellent pressure to prevent long-developing plays like long throws.
This strategy requires 3 exact steps all working effectively at the same time: 3 elite CB's clamping down and denying short routes, at least 2 elite pass rushers/blitzers to quickly and consistently generate pressure, and 1 elite FS to cover all of those CB's over the top. We lack one player at all three of those positions. So if we're serious about retooling our team vs. Brady, we need not only an elite pass rusher (two really since Wake is near the end of his career), but also at least one more dominant CB, and an elite FS. In my lifetime I can't recall a time when the Dolphins have valued a FS enough to draft one in the 1st round, and the chances of us getting one later in the draft are slim. Look at our history, all of our top safeties have been strong safeties ... Reshad Jones, Yeremiah Bell, Brock Marion, Jarvis Williams, etc. etc. etc. We just don't value the FS position enough to make this strategy work. So, unless we get lucky and find the next Ed Reed in round 5 or something (and Ed Reed was a 1st round elite safety obviously), this plan isn't going to work. Sure, maybe a Malik Hooker falls to 22 because of a last minute injury scare or something, but aside from one of those two highly unlikely things happening, we simply aren't going to have the FS to make this work. We traded down from where we might have drafted Earl Thomas to draft Jared Odrick and Koa Misi (over Rob Gronkowski), and liked Odrick so much we didn't even resign him to a second contract, and aren't pursuing him now either ... while Earl Thomas continues to be All-Pro elite. So if you were serious about this approach, you'd be advocating for trading up into the top 6 to get MH from Ohio State. He is that next elite FS, and he will not come cheaply.
Yeah, I agree, getting two pass rushers is the thing to do in this draft. But let's be clear, it's still not going to get us over the hump against Brady and the Patriots ... because only one strategy works against them at the moment, and it requires more than just the pass rushers.
