That legit. But I never liked 270(or less) pound DEs. Disliked them... Kampman and KGB were the exceptions. Kampman was just awesome, and KGB was a specialist..... I wanted a 300 pound Reggie look alike...
Well, most 4-3 ends are in the 265-275 pound range. Even today. I get why you want big beefy guys across the line, but I think you have a misunderstanding of how most 4-3 ends are built.
Reggie is a little bit of an oddity. Most men that size can't play fast enough for outside contain. See: Reggie as the end of his career in GB.
He's further an oddity in that the Fritz 4-3 is more of a hybrid not unlike Seattle. Reggie was used more like a 3-4 end than a 4-3 end. He was strong-side and was supposed to blow up guys more, while the Right/Weak DE was an undersized speed rusher, more like a 3-4 OLB. Of course, that's a gross over simplification.
D-linemen that demand a double team are rare... I believe there is an opportunity to go from 5 O-linemen and 4 D-linemen, advantage offense +1. Now for every D-lineman that demands the double team, defense gets another one man advantage... Theoreticly, I believe a 3-4 doesnt work unless you have 3 great D-linemen that command 5 O-linemen to stop them...That what allows the 2 man advantage for the rest of the defense... In a 4-3 defense theres the potential to dominate up front... But the flexability of the 3-4 is a valuable strategy in its own right... I've always believed D-linemen are big! DE's 300+, DTs 320+ with one preferably a Gilbert Brown clone to anchor the middle.
So I'll pick on that some more.
Ideally, yes, a 3-4 has 3 two-gappers, but that style of play has largely gone out of style. Modern 3-4s typically just need one of those guys and he's usually the NT. With all the counter actions and similar, just having big guys two-gapping typically gives the offense too many options. Let your NT control both A gaps, your ends the C gaps, your OLBs contain, and a combination of your ILBs and your NT and Ends (if your Guard takes out an ILB, the NT slides into the vacated gap, the End squeezes on the Tackle down) and you're sorted.
Now "dominating" with 4 linemen. I understand why you would think that, 3-4 fronts tend to be bigger and thus more likely to be dominating. The typical, modern 4-3 has a NT, just like a 3-4. He
can be a touch smaller, because while he's forcing a double team, he's doing so with positioning more than anything else--he'll be in an A-Gap. You add in a 3-technique DT to help rush the passer. He'll also be in a gap, normally the B-Gap away from the NT. Warren Sapp is the archtype, but in our world, you could easily imagine Raji as the NT and Daniels as the 3-tech, for example.
At left/strong end, we have a glut of players that actually project quiet well. Peppers, Neal, Perry. They don't have to be and are not true two-gappers, the strong end will get doubled by the TE on plays. At right/weak end, kind of the same, though you swap in Matthews for Neal.
While that'd be a nice, strong set, I don't see it inherentily more dominating than our preferred 3-4 front.
Which brings us to the typical point: 3-4s are schematically the better run defense, 4-3s pass defense. (Obviously both get the job done as a base alignment, but both are slight compromises. Small ones, lets say 55/45 or 60/40, but it's there.) If that sounds odd to you, look a the most common nickel line: the 4-2, which very obviously looks more like a 4-3 than a 3-4. And coming full circle, that's why we run a 2-4 nickel: because really, our OLBs are really defensive ends.
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