Based just on highlights, Corum has more stop-n0-go, open field elusive quickness than KW. That’s not a knock on KW, who is the king of setting up and reading blocks (KW’s supepowers all boil down to his play before he hits the LOS). It’s going to be a good combo, these 2, it looks like.

from https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2024/04/15092257/TheBeast2024_MasterFile-9.pdf

 Overall, Fiske doesn’t have a deep arsenal of counters if he doesn’t win early, but he already has a professional mindset and his twitchy urgency and steady play strength will translate well to the pro game. He projects as a rotational three -technique with versatility to move around an aggressive front.

.@RamsNFL @bradenfiske55 @JaredVerse1 LAR are rebuilding the Defensive trenches. Who doesnt love the way Fiske plays. #BaldysBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/ljQZAQxied

— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) April 27, 2024

Here's closest thing you'll get to feeling what it's like trying to block Florida State's Braden Fiske.

Twitchy. Active hands. Relentless.

𝑵𝑶𝑻 𝑭𝑼𝑵!#TheDraftStartsInMOBILE™️ pic.twitter.com/KAxxSL1qDt

— Jim Nagy (@JimNagy_SB) February 27, 2024

canadaram wrote:

His effort on every play and the fact he should be able to play more than one defensive line position, has me thinking that teams might want to select him early in this draft.

This is a theme. Or 2 of them. Verse + Fiske =

1. position versatility;

2. relentless motor

They are re-populating the front 7. That was the most likely call before the draft, they would get at least 2 front 7 players early in the draft, and it’s happening.

Jared Verse will be a great asset against the run game!

The Rams found themselves getting gashed at times last season, but Verse has a proven track record being stout and forcing his way to negate the run.

A 2 way player for sure pic.twitter.com/qlGadLvPt5

— RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) April 26, 2024

#19 Rams
Jared Verse brings it on every play. See him as a 7-9 sack per year guy but also sound in run game. Bunch of young guys in that front 7 as the post-Donald era begins

— Chris Simms (@CSimmsQB) April 26, 2024

..

The “bendy” bit has to do with attacking a blocker as a pass rusher. Robert Quinn had that; Kevin Greene didn’t.

A different issue is whether he is effective in space as an LB, handling the whole array of LB duties in space. I don’t know. I can only say Kevin Greene wasn’t known for that. Though I have seen Verse compared to Fowler. How good was Fowler as a traditional LB in space?

But let’s say all the Rams end up getting in Verse is a role player who comes in to play DE (or DT) on obvious passing downs. Well–truth is, they didn’t even have that. And from all reports he would be superlative in that role. He’s not just power and speed either. He does have some decent technique and an absolutely relentless motor.

But you know in terms of weaknesses…Verse actually has a bit more going for him athletically than TJ Watt does. Here’s a report from 2017 of Watt’s shortcomings. The red bits are things also said about Verse, more or less. The blue bits are areas where Verse is actually better athletically (on paper anyway):

Not overly twitched-up as an athlete. Short strider who lacks explosion out of stance and up the field to bend the edge as a pass rusher. Foot quickness is average and needs to win with technique and great hand play. Won’t generate enough acceleration to crank up speed-to-power rush with consistency. Plays with a narrow base. Needs to play with more consistent bend to play through redirection by offensive line.

InvaderRam wrote:

well cosell states he’s a pure 4-3 end which to me sounds like the defense is gonna have to change. or am i missing something?

Just an IMO, but…I think an end/LB conversion is not that big an issue. From the sounds of it he can be coached into an adjustment. Cosell mentions false steps when he’s standing up. That can be coached out. Plus one of the things the Rams like about him is versatility. He can line up at DE, DT, and LB. That seems to be a Rams thing on D–shifting fronts and disguising coverages. An edge/LB who can line up as a pure 4/3 DE whenever they want to do that? It’s a good thing.

wv wrote:

I dont think he’s a ‘sure thing’ at the NFL level. Just have to wait and see, i guess.

What you don’t appreciate is the fact that Verse is a CEO style pass rusher.

(That joke is likely way too obscure for most here).

We need an exodus from Zionism

Naomi Klein

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/zionism-seder-protest-new-york-gaza-israel?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3mGo2naz8ts93WGN_SBlelsl1h4JVQNMZF7A4e2oj27n0khwTYlMTVYBA_aem_AcXZTkeM8n90Q2jyN–iVBPutYID-g9I0pXzMbnxt3vpfq8WeImreZ2BpEdda1Li9rl2u8eq1-OkqhbPSXFLxCOB

This Passover, we don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name

I’ve been thinking about Moses, and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.

The ecofeminist in me was always uneasy about this story: what kind of God is jealous of animals? What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself?

But there is a less literal way of understanding this story. It is about false idols. About the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.

What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.

That false idol is called Zionism.

Zionism is a false idol that has taken the idea of the promised land and turned it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate

It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.

Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.

From the start it has been at war with dreams of liberation. At a Seder it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism equates Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and client states.

From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons.

Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here.

It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.

We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism
It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.

Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child.

Including the love we have as a people for text and for education.

Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets – this is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the means of education.

Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call in the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students daring to ask them basic questions, such as: how can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?

The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long.

So tonight we say: it ends here.

Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by nature.

Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that state, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred – including against us as Jews.

Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations.

Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in that chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.

Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, the ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other: no walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even – especially – the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirit.

So look around. This, here, is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost.

We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. Freedom from an ideology that has no plan for peace other than deals with murderous theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world.

We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.

That is the false idol.

And it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.

What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism.

And to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say: “Let our people go.”

We say: “We have already gone. And your kids? They’re with us now.”

Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, was published in September
This is a transcript of a speech delivered at the Emergency Seder in the Streets in New York City