Commanders' defense improving but still has issues to fix
While the Commanders' defense has been steadily improving over the last few weeks, there's still plenty of issues for them to correct going forward.
The Washington Commanders’ defense has quietly been improving over the last few weeks after a poor start to the season. In fact, I’ve written a number of pieces over the last few weeks praising the defensive line and both linebackers Cole Holcomb and Jamin Davis for improved play. The secondary has seemingly improved too since the benching of William Jackson and Benjamin St-Juste reverting from the slot to replace Jackson as an outside cornerback. Statistically, the Commanders are now 13th in yards allowed per game and 19th in points allowed per game, which isn’t necessarily anything to brag about but still an improvement from where they were at the start of the season.
This week, they held the Packers’ offense to just two touchdowns, with a third score coming from Taylor Heinicke’s pick-six. On the face of it, holding an Aaron Rodgers team to just two touchdowns is a very good performance and they do deserve some credit for that. However, before we all get carried away with the defense suddenly being great, I think it’s worth pointing out some warning signs that there are cracks in this defense that haven’t been exploited. There were a number of plays in the Packers game that had Rodgers been playing to even somewhat close to his best, the Packers may well have won the game.
This is the first play I wanted to highlight as a potential warning sign. Here, the Packers use a play-action concept with a tight end crossing from the back side and a receiver running a post-corner-post from the right side. The Commanders have two safeties in on this play, Darrick Forrest lines up slightly closer to the line of scrimmage over the bunch set to the right while Kam Curl aligns slightly deeper on the other side of the field. Off the snap, Forrest locks in on the receiver running the deep route and bumps him, but then passes him off to Curl. Meanwhile, Curl locks onto the crossing route from the back side and recognizes the threat of the crosser on the bootleg so he charges down to try and take it away. This leaves the receiver running free in the deep middle of the field.
Now, it could be that Kendall Fuller is meant to replace Curl deep once Curl drives down on the crosser and that is essentially what happens. But in that scenario, this coverage call leaves Fuller with a ton of ground to cover, especially given his starting point is up near the line of scrimmage and he has a run assignment too. On top of that, it would leave him with horrific leverage against any route that isn’t just crossing the field towards him. Had this receiver just run a straight go route, Fuller would have had no chance of catching him. It feels more likely that one of Curl or Forrest should have run with the receiver while the other picked up the crosser. Fortunately for them though, Rodgers uncharacteristically misses the throw by some distance after trying to lead the receiver back outside and away from Fuller.
This was far from the only play that Rodgers missed either.
On this play, Rodgers looks to hit receiver Sammy Watkins on a vertical route to the right side of the field. Watkins works against St-Juste, who lines up in press but allows Watkins a free inside release off the snap. St-Juste loses ground to Watkins on the route as Watkins accelerates away from him initially. St-Juste gets very grabby as a result to try and slow him down and give himself a chance of catching up. Watkins has a step the whole way and because of his inside release he has a bunch of space to fade into away from the safety. That causes St-Juste to panic and he ends up wrapping his arm around Watkins while looking back to try and locate the ball. He was initially flagged for pass interference, which would have stood had the ball not sailed a good five yards over their heads and been deemed uncatchable.
St-Juste moving outside has helped the defense as he’s understood what his assignments are out there better than Jackson had, leading to less busts from communication issues. However, he’s still a young and raw player that we can’t forget missed a large part of his rookie season with concussions issues. There are quite a few times when that rawness shows up and he can get beaten early leading to him making mistakes like grabbing onto receivers. He still has a lot of development to do if he’s to become a reliable starting cornerback in the NFL, despite some very promising traits and flashes.
There was a stat doing the rounds after the game that the Commanders managed to prevent Rodgers from converting a single third down attempt for the first time in his entire career, which is quite an achievement. However, their third down defense was far from perfect and they were lucky not to give up one or two conversions.
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