Meet Blake Martinez, your new dime backer with maybe some nickel zone coverage duty. I'm not sure it goes much further than that for 2016.
But we can take encouragement in the additions by subtraction.
Getting Palmer off the field around mid-season, be it run game or pass game, was an improvement regardless of who you put there. He was that bad, and Ryan showed a lot of improvement from early games to late games.
Joe Thomas likewise. No field awareness; he just stands there watching the QBs eyes until something happens...a guy crossing his face that he has to chase or reacting late to the seam. 3rd. and 8, 6 DBs, a dropping ILB, first down! I think we've all had a bellyful of that. It's hard to blame the player; he was an OLB that didn't work out. You want more than a guy who just takes up space. The consensus is that Martinez's strength is zone coverage, which is exactly what you want in dime and nickel zone drops.
Getting Matthews out of the middle is addition by both subtraction and addition. Take away the blitzing, and Matthews was more liability than playmaker at ILB. That's the subtraction. Put him back on the edge and that is of course the addition. The Matthews excitement of 2014 turned increasingly sour as the 2015 season wore on...consider it tendencies put to tape and exploited. It was an honorable but ultimately failed experiment.
So, with Ryan, Barrington (evidence indicates the brain trust is not concerned about that foot) and Martinez, with Matthews back where he belongs, there's nowhere to go but up. I'll reserve judgment until after a couple preseason games as to whether "up" will be enough.