Commanders Position Profile: Cornerback

Profiling the key traits the Commanders want in a cornerback

With the NFL season officially over, it’s time to start looking ahead to the offseason. Before jumping into free agency and draft prospect breakdowns, I thought it might be interesting to put together some position profiles at the main positions of need for the Commanders. In this series, I’ll be breaking down the key traits that the Commanders will be looking for in new players at each position. That way when we get to free agency and the draft, we can evaluate players based on how they fit what the Commanders are looking for rather than just overall talent.

One of the biggest needs the Commanders have this offseason is at corner. The team did trade for Marshon Lattimore during the season, but he is one of only two corners under contract for next season. Despite playing well outside, Mike Sainristil seems likely to move back inside to the slot in his second season, which is the position he was originally drafted for. So the need for Washington is primarily on the outside, where they’ll need at least one starter and some depth pieces too. So what traits will they be looking for in a cornerback? Let’s take a closer look.

One of the top traits this team will be looking for is ball skills. You hear head coach Dan Quinn and defensive coordinator Joe Whitt Jr. talking all the time about turnovers and takeaways. “The ball is life” is a phrase both have used frequently. The Commanders weren’t good enough at creating turnovers in the regular season and part of the reason why is they didn’t have corners with ball skills. Only Sainristil, a rookie drafted by this regime, displayed the type of ball skills they’re looking for.

Here is Sainristil’s first interception in the playoff win against the Lions last month. This is a perfect example of what the Commanders are looking for in terms of ball skills. The Commanders play a quarters coverage with the two outside corners and the two deep safeties all splitting the deep part of the field into quarters, each responsible for a zone. The Lions run a great quarters beating concept to their right, with the slot receiver running a basic cross and the outside receiver running a post route over the top of it. Typically in quarters coverage, a post route would be bracketed nicely by the cornerback on the outside and the safety on the inside. But with this concept, the safety inside is occupied underneath by the slot receiver, leaving Sainristil on the outside in a tough position.

Sainristil plays this perfectly. He gains depth to stay on top of the route but doesn’t surrender too much width. This means when the receiver breaks inside to the post, Sainristil is able to stay in the play despite not having the safety inside to help him as he would have been expecting. When the quarterback puts the ball in the air, Sainristil is still close to the receiver and on top of the route, so he shows off his ball skills. Instead of focusing on guarding the receiver, Sainristil turns into the receiver himself. He focuses on the ball and does a great job undercutting the route to intercept the pass. This requires great tracking ability, judgment of angles and the physical skill of catching the ball. The latter seems easy but a lot of corners do struggle with this.

That combination of skills comes under the umbrella of ball skills. Sainristil has them in abundance, which is why he was able to make four interceptions over the course of his rookie season, including two in the playoffs. The rest of the Commanders corners lacked the ball skills to make as much of an impact as Sainristil and it showed in the lack of interceptions from the rest of the team. That will be something the Commanders look to correct. In Dallas, Quinn and Whitt had two of the most productive corners in Trevon Diggs and Daron Bland and the common trait they shared was ball skills. So any corner that has good ball skills, be it in free agency or the draft, will likely be of interest to the Commanders.

But ball skills aren’t the only important trait. Quinn and Whitt want to play defense in a very particular style. They love to blitz and commit multiple defenders to the rush in order to generate pressure and force the ball out quickly. This is, in their mind, the best way to generate turnover opportunities. But to commit so many bodies to the pass rush, the coverage behind the blitz needs to be able to hold up in man coverage. Now when we think of man coverage, we naturally think of big, physical corners that line up in press coverage and try to jam receivers at the line of scrimmage. Certainly, the Commanders do have their corners do that sometimes, but they also ask different things of them. Often when they have the corners press, they don’t require them to try and jam receivers. Instead, they want their corners to show patience at the snap and force the receiver to declare their intentions.

This rep is a great example of the type of patient press the Commanders tend to have their corners play, if and when they do use press coverage. Noah Igbinoghene lines up in the slot here. The Browns slot receiver attempts to fake out Igbinoghene with a couple of jab steps outside before breaking inside on a slant route. You can see just how patient Igbinoghene is at the snap here. The receiver gets to his third step before Igbinoghene even moves.

It takes a lot of nerve not to react to those stutter steps at the line of scrimmage and not get opened up in the wrong direction, but Igbinoghene does a terrific job keeping calm and staying patient. Once the receiver declares his intent to break inside, that’s when Igbinoghene reacts. He steps inside with the receiver and gets his hands on him to disrupt the route. He’s right there with the receiver and the quarterback still attempts the throw, but because of his patience and positioning, Igbinoghene is able to undercut the pass and break it up.

So the Commanders aren’t necessarily targeting big, long, physical corners that look to aggressively jam receivers at the line of scrimmage. That’s not to say they wouldn’t take that type of guy, Lattimore likes to do that quite a bit, but it’s not their primary form of man coverage technique. In fact, the Commanders actually like their corners to be able to play man coverage from an off-coverage technique.