He missed quite a few tackles, was routinely torched in coverage and couldn’t contain a QB. Just getting a lot of tackles doesn’t make a LB good. So he was 2nd in the SEC in tackles? Did he make 1st or 2nd team all SEC? No he didn’t. Why?
He was 4th in solo tackles. Which isn’t that terrible. But 14th in TFL, didn’t rank in the top 20 in the SEC in sacks. If we would have had competent LB play Pitt, Ole Miss and Perdue are wins. Bryce Young had his career day rushing against us. A big reason for that was our LBs that included Banks.
So no Banks isn’t that good. Looking at his complete stats (not just cherry picking one) he would not likely be starting for many SEC teams. Hopefully he has drastically improved.
I'm sure a player with 128 tackles pretty much proves his around the ball enough to miss a tackle here and there. The bigger question is imagine how much better he'd be with a better LB next to him that could tackle. We probably wouldn't be saying he missed too many tackles, even though he had 128. Disagree again on blaming him for the losses unless we're willing to credit him with the wins.
He missed quite a few tackles, was routinely torched in coverage and couldn’t contain a QB. Just getting a lot of tackles doesn’t make a LB good. So he was 2nd in the SEC in tackles? Did he make 1st or 2nd team all SEC? No he didn’t. Why?
He was 4th in solo tackles. Which isn’t that terrible. But 14th in TFL, didn’t rank in the top 20 in the SEC in sacks. If we would have had competent LB play Pitt, Ole Miss and Perdue are wins. Bryce Young had his career day rushing against us. A big reason for that was our LBs that included Banks.
So no Banks isn’t that good. Looking at his complete stats (not just cherry picking one) he would not likely be starting for many SEC teams. Hopefully he has drastically improved.
I'm seeing he was 2nd in tackles, tied for 9th in sacks (as an ILB). Most of the LBs in the top five like Will Anderson play exclusively on the edge. Also looks like he was 2nd in the conference in Pass Deflections with 4. It's ok to not like the guy, but it's hard to argue he wasn't one of the lone bright spots on a defense last year. Theo and Butler are the only ones who come to mind that were on the field as much that played harder and gave as much effort when you watch closely.
I'll say again that it's extremely disingenuous to blame our (by a landslide) leading tackler for losses, but not credit him for wins.
He didn't make 1st or 2nd team all conference because that's only two spots and he wasn't one of the best two linebackers in the best conference. However, that doesn't mean he wasn't one of our 3 best defensive players. Really, it's entirely likely he should be regarded as one of the top returning ILBs in the SEC.