Evaluating the Commanders offensive line vs Tampa Bay

Breaking down the performance of the Commanders OL vs the Bucs

The Washington Commanders offensive line was inconsistent in the win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday night. They all battled extremely hard and played tough, physical football throughout, which is exactly what this team demands of them. But oftentimes that effort wasn’t enough. The Bucs were able to generate plenty of pressure and Jayden Daniels had to bail them out of it. While having Jayden Daniels is a luxury that can help the offensive line, it’s not great to have to rely on him scrambling around to make plays out of structure too often.

With that in mind, I thought today I would look at some of the positives and negatives off the offensive line play from the Bucs game. We’ll start with one of the big positives up front and that is center Tyler Biadasz. Biadasz has been playing hurt for much of the season and you could see him with a slight limp after certain plays like screens and such, so clearly he’s not 100% healthy. But despite that, Biadasz fought incredibly hard in this game and made some big blocks in very tough situations. As the center, he’s often the man tasked with helping others with stunts. From the very first play, he was ready to help his linemates.

This was the Commanders opening play of the game. The Bucs line up nose tackle Vita Vea in the A gap between Tyler Biadasz and left guard Nick Allegretti. They also have defensive tackle Logan Hall outside of Allegretti and defensive Calijah Kancey outside of right guard Sam Cosmi. In an ideal world, Biadasz would be able to help Cosmi on Kancey because Kancey has been one of the Bucs better defensive lineman this year, but with Vea and Hall on the left side, Biadasz has to leave Cosmi one-on-one and work to the left side. The alignment is one thing, but the Bucs add in a stunt, with Vea rushing up the field into Allegretti’s path while Hall loops around behind him to work back inside.

At the snap, Biadasz works to Vea while Allegretti tries to fan out to Hall. After just one step, it becomes pretty clear that Hall is looping back inside and Allegretti needs to pick up Vea to allow Biadasz to slide over and pick up the stunt. However, Allegretti gets himself in a bad position, meaning Biadasz can’t pass off Vea cleanly. Biadasz stays engaged in the block with Vea as Allegretti gets completely turned around, but somehow Biadasz also manages to work inside and get a hand on Hall, preventing him from bursting through the line of scrimmage. This buys Jayden Daniels some time, but unfortunately Cosmi loses his block on Kancey and Daniels has to throw the ball away to avoid taking a sack.

Teams have targeted Allegretti with stunts like that lately and he hasn’t always responded well, which is why the Bucs opened up with that look. Fortunately, Biadasz was able to bail him out of trouble with a fantastic effort on two defenders at the same time, including one of the biggest defensive lineman in football in Vita Vea. Vea is a tough block for any lineman and typically requires two sets of hands on him, but Biadasz managed to handle him one-on-one in a lot of situations, even with bad leverage.

On this play, the Commanders attempt something they haven’t all season, a play-action pass off a GT Counter fake. GT Counter is one of their favorite and most effective run schemes, but it’s so dangerous to run a play-action fake off of it because it pulls two lineman from one side, leaving so much space for a defender to run through on the back side of the fake. The Commanders run it here, likely anticipating that the edge rusher to that side was going to drop off into coverage, which is something the Bucs like to do a lot, so this wasn’t as risky. However, running this scheme still puts Biadasz in a really tough situation.

With both the right guard and right tackle pulling on the run fake, there’s nobody outside of Biadasz to his right side to help him against Vita Vea. Once he snaps the ball, Biadasz has to be incredibly quick to get out to Vea and try to force him wider. Typically he’d have a guard and tackle out there to help slow Vea down and contain him, but Vea has nothing but space to work with here. Biadasz effectively becomes the right tackle here and does a great job to battle and force Vea as wide as possible, allowing Daniels to step up in the pocket and run Vea past him.

That rep shows why the Commanders haven’t tried to use a GT Counter fake for a play-action pass all season, despite the GT Counter scheme being one of their best run schemes. It puts the center in a really tough spot, especially against one of the best defensive lineman in football. But Biadasz stood up well to the test and did about as well as you could have asked him to do in that situation. Later in the game, Biadasz got a true one-on-one against Vea in pass protection.