Week 2 in the 2011 NFL season will see the Kansas City Chiefs traveling to play the Detroit Lions and one of the focuses in the game will be the Lions defensive line. The headliner, obviously, is DT Ndamukong Suh but there's also DE Kyle Vanden Bosch and DT Corey Williams.
One guy we haven't really talked about is DE Cliff Avril. I talked with SB Nation's Pride of Detroit, asking which player Chiefs fans don't know but they should, and they noted Avril.
One player who seems to get overlooked a bit is defensive end Cliff Avril. With so much talent on the D-line, the position group gets a lot of love as a whole, but on an individual basis Ndamukong Suh seems to grab most of the headlines. He obviously deserves the recognition, but Avril deserves some love as well. He had 19 sacks during his first three seasons, as well as eight forced fumbles. Last year, he recorded 8.5 sacks in only 13 games. He is an excellent speed rusher and is someone who can make plays when he gets by his man and into the backfield.
Great. Another up-and-coming on this defensive line for the Chiefs to deal with.
How the Chiefs handle this defensive line will tell us a lot. They've struggled against teams built similarly along the defensive front so will they continue the trend of getting beat up front, or have they identified the problem and, more importantly, fixed it?