By this point it’s no longer a
secret that the pass rush is the most important part of a defense. Any casual
football fan has seen this become clear over the past ten years, as offenses
have become more oriented towards the passing game and defenses have been
forced to adapt. Despite the success of the Legion of Boom, a pass rush remains
the easiest way to slow down a passing attack, and to build a championship
caliber team in the NFL a top notch pass rusher is almost a prerequisite.
So far this season has given us
plenty of examples of how much a defensive front can affect a game. The two
most disappointing teams in the league are the Seahawks and the Colts, both of
whom are 0-2 due to their inability to stop the opposing defensive lines. I
touched on these teams last week, and I don’t really have anything new to say.
They had the misfortune of playing teams with loaded defensive fronts, and
they’ll have more success as they face easier competition. The offensive lines
will remain a serious concern that could hold them back once the playoffs
arrive, but I’m not going to write any seasons off just yet.
We’ve also seen examples on the
other end of the spectrum. The Bills demolished the Colts and held reasonably
tight against the Patriots despite not being good at anything outside their
front four. Carolina’s front continues to beat up on bad teams, and Denver has
survived offensive woes on the strength of an absolutely terrifying pass rush
that will keep them in the hunt all year no matter what ends up happening with
Peyton Manning.
The winless teams and the
undefeated teams make excellent demonstrations, but far more interesting are
the teams who have split the results over the first two weeks. Specifically,
three 1-1 teams have reached this record by virtue of inconsistent defensive
fronts, carrying them to the top one week while dooming them to failure the other.
Two weeks into the season we still don’t know what we will see from the
defensive fronts of the 49ers, the Steelers, and the Vikings, but whichever way
it goes will play a major role in their fates over the rest of the season.
These three teams have actually
played a pair of games between them so far this year. The 49ers’ victory came
over the Vikings in Week One, a dominating 20-3 victory on Monday night
football that was followed by a 43-18 beatdown at the hands of the Steelers in
Week Two. Pittsburgh was coming off an opening night defeat of the Patriots,
while Minnesota followed up their loss to San Francisco with a 26-16 victory
over the Lions.
For none of these three teams was
it really clear what we were supposed to expect from their defenses coming into
the season. We are all aware of the turmoil San Francisco went through this
offseason, losing three of the four best players in their front seven. After
years near the top of the league, many expected them to regress on defense,
though there were glimmers of hope with the return of Navarro Bowman and young
players like Aaron Lynch and Arik Armstead.
We had a better idea what to
expect from Pittsburgh and Minnesota, but there were still questions coming
into the year. The Vikings had one of the best fronts in the league last
season, and many expected them to take the next step this year. Pittsburgh was
on the other end of the spectrum. They were absolutely brutal a year ago, but
there were promising signs for their front seven. After years of Dick LeBeau’s
zone blitzing scheme that relied on their defensive linemen to eat up blockers
while the linebackers shot into the backfield, the Steelers decided to move on
from the Hall of Famer, promoting linebacker coach Keith Butler to defensive
coordinator. Though they kept their defensive scheme mostly the same, they made
changes to better fit their personnel, asking their defensive line to be more aggressive
shooting into the backfield. With budding star Cameron Heyward, underrated
nosetackle Steve McLendon, and promising second year player Stephon Tuitt,
there was hope that this change would allow them to pose a greater threat to
quarterbacks this year.
After the first week of the
season though, the faith in the Vikings and the Steelers seemed misplaced.
Pittsburgh couldn’t touch Tom Brady on opening night, allowing him to chew
their secondary to pieces at a pace even their high powered offense couldn’t
keep up with. And on the following Monday, the Vikings defensive front was
beaten down by San Francisco’s offensive line. They couldn’t contain Colin
Kaepernick, and they could do nothing to stop Carlos Hyde on the ground. Even
though it looked like the 49ers were playing most of the game without wide
receivers, they moved the ball without much trouble on the Vikings.
On the other side of the ball,
San Francisco’s front looked better than even the most optimistic 49ers fan
could have imagined. Teddy Bridgewater was running for his life the entire
game, and Adrian Peterson managed only 31 yards on ten carries. Minnesota’s
wretched and injury plagued offensive line deserved its share of blame, but
there was no way to deny that San Francisco’s defense had the look of a high
quality pass rush.
Of course, as often happens,
everything we thought we knew after Week One fell apart in Week Two. San
Francisco didn’t manage to so much as hit Ben Roethlisberger one time, and the
Steelers probably could have scored even more than the 43 points they put up if
they’d kept their foot on the gas.
While San Francisco’s pass rush
regressed, both Pittsburgh and Minnesota took major steps forward. Matthew
Stafford looked absolutely miserable on Sunday, hit so often and so violently
that he actually had trouble figuring out which of his wounds was dripping
blood down his arm. Pittsburgh found similar success against the same 49ers
line that had shut the Vikings down a week earlier, compiling five sacks on
Kaepernick and doing a fine job containing Hyde.
So what changed between the two
weeks for these teams? Was it normal variance, or was there something more
schematic involved? And, more importantly, which of these teams are we more
likely to see over the course of the remainder of the season?
To figure out why things swung so
much between the first and the second week, we need to look at what things had
changed. The first and most obvious thing to look at is the competition. If a
team plays a top quality offensive line one week and faces garbage competition
the next, it’s obvious that their pass rush will improve.
In the case of San Francisco,
this looks like the easiest explanation. Minnesota’s offensive line was
expected to be bad coming into the season, and that was before they lost John
Sullivan and Phil Loadholt to injuries. They were awful in the first game, and
they weren’t all that much better against Detroit, only putting up better
protection numbers by virtue of more quick passes. On the other hand,
Pittsburgh quietly has one of the best offensive lines in the league, and even
without center Maurkice Pouncey they have done a fine job keeping
Roethlisberger upright. New England and San Francisco combined for only two
sacks of Roethlisberger, while putting up thirteen sacks between their games
against Minnesota and Buffalo. The difference between the offensive lines of
the Vikings and the Steelers are drastic, possibly even enough to explain the
disappearance of San Francisco’s pass rush.
Of course, this early in the
season it isn’t always that easy to evaluate a team’s competition. The Vikings
demolished Detroit’s offensive line, a unit that held up fairly well Week One
against San Diego’s lackadaisical defensive front. Pittsburgh didn’t do much
against the Patriots to start the season, and New England followed that up by holding
down Buffalo’s elite pass rush. But things get interesting when you consider
that both the Vikings and the Steelers faced San Francisco. The 49ers offensive
line has been one of the top units in the league for years, and even with some
losses they looked very good against Minnesota. Pittsburgh tore them to pieces,
raising questions about how good they are and how bad the Vikings might be. Competition
is useful, but this early in the season it is difficult to be sure what to
think of any teams. So instead we should look for schematic changes that might
have occurred between games.
Pittsburgh didn’t make many changes,
but there were major differences between the offensive styles of the two teams
they played. New England is perfectly suited to take advantage of Pittsburgh’s
defensive weakness, which is their secondary. The Steelers actually managed to
get good push against New England’s offensive line, but it didn’t matter when
Brady was able to get the ball out before the rush could get anywhere near him.
Against the Steelers secondary there are always going to be open receivers, and
few quarterbacks in NFL history have been as good as Brady at identifying these
opportunities prior to the snap and getting the ball to them.
The 49ers passing attack is more
representative of the rest of the league. The openings were there, but
Kaepernick wasn’t able to find them, allowing Pittsburgh’s front time to show
how good they are. And given the opportunity, their young players stepped up in
every way we could have imagined. Bud Dupree looks explosive and has a sack in
each of his first two games. Stephon Tuitt added a pair of sacks against the
49ers. Most impressive was Ryan Shazier, who flew all over the field both
against the run and the pass. He shot behind the line so quickly and so
frequently that I began to wonder if he was actually starting each play in San
Francisco’s backfield. What Pittsburgh did against San Francisco is a best case
scenario, but it is more likely to recur than their struggles against Brady in
Week One.
The biggest change the Vikings
saw was on their own side of the ball. After playing only 10 defensive snaps
against San Francisco, rookie Eric Kendricks saw 53 against Detroit, the second
most of any linebacker on the Vikings. A large part of this decision was
schematic, a heavier use of their nickel package against a pass happy Lions
team. But after the success their front had with him in the lineup, the Vikings
need to consider making this a full time change. Chad Greenway has been a fine
player for a long time with the Vikings, but right now he is a liability
whenever he is on the field, and it isn’t a coincidence that the Vikings had
one of their best defensive performances in years when he played a career low
14 defensive snaps.
It remains to be seen how
Minnesota will shape their defensive front going forward, but I trust that Mike
Zimmer knows what he does and does not have. Some parts of their performance
will fall off (Brian Robison is a mediocre player and always has been, and he
won’t be nearly as good as he was against the Lions going forward), but like
the Steelers they have a lot of youth that will continue to improve on that
side of the ball.
We know how important a pass rush
is to a defense’s success, but we often overlook how volatile this can be.
We’re used to seeing the performance of a quarterback swing from week to week,
but a unit as a whole should be safer from such randomness. But this clearly
isn’t always the case. Pass rushes rise and fall as wildly as any other part of
a football team, and these swings can play as great a role in a team’s fortune
as inconsistent quarterback play.