Sorry for bombarding the forum, but I'm back from vacation and excited about all the Packers stuff going on right now!!
Article on Elliott:
http://www.packersnews.com/story/sports/nfl/packers/2015/10/01/elliott-pushing-playing-time/73144120/A year ago at this time, Jayrone Elliott was fulfilling all the duties required of the new outside linebacker on the block.
With the Green Bay Packers enjoying their healthiest season on record under coach Mike McCarthy, the undrafted rookie’s responsibilities rarely deviated from his work on special teams and occasionally delivering food for veterans Clay Matthews and Julius Peppers before flights to road games.
HAHAHA!
Elliott needs to be on the field more for 2 reasons:
#1 He's making plays, he needs more PT for a chance to make more plays!
#2 We are going to lose 1-3 OLBs next year, we need to see if this guy can be a solid replacement!!
There's a good chance both Nick Perry and Mike Neal are gone next year. They are kinda like last year's Davon House. They show great potential, have good size, flash ability, but they are hurt often. Also their performances are inconsistent.
Pass rushing ability is a premium, so all it takes is 1 team to offer big $$$$ and these guys will get a fat contract the Packers won't afford and move on. Since neither Perry or Neal are very old I'm sure some teams will take a gamble and give them some pretty good coin. Both were high draft picks so I could see other teams big fairly interested.
There's also the risk of losing Peppers. He could retire or become too expensive for his final year (cap value: $10.5 M) may be too expensive for his final year.
In that worse case we lose 3 OLBs in one offseason.
My hope is Peppers gets back to making big plays and shows he's worth keeping around a final year and we lose maybe one of Neal or Perry and the other doesn't get much of a look and we can keep the remaining guy on the cheap.
Anyway you look at it, we need to see what Elliott can do with a bigger snap count. We can't go into 2016 down a couple OLBs finding out Elliott is only good for 15 snaps and has some major flaw like has no ability to contain the run or something like that.
So far Elliott looks like a big man who's the fastest LB on the team not named Clay Matthews. Let's see if coaches can up his snap count and see what he can do.