What changes to expect from Ron Rivera calling the defense
Breaking down the potential major changes on defense with Jack Del Rio gone and Ron Rivera taking over.
The Washington Commanders made some significant changes to the coaching staff after losing to the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving. Defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio and defensive backs coach Brent Vieselmeyer were both fired after the team continued to struggle on defense. The Commanders lead the league in explosive plays surrendered, points allowed and are third in passing yards allowed per game.
Head coach Ron Rivera will take over the play calling duties for the rest of the season and said he’d be looking to make some changes to the defense to try and improve what has been a shambolic season for a defense that was meant to be the strength of the team. So what are those changes that Rivera will be looking to make? The most significant change I suspect we’ll see from Rivera is a shift from man coverage to zone coverage.
This season, Del Rio called a frankly insane amount of man coverage. The defense has been built around zone and match coverages. Veteran corner Kendall Fuller is excellent in such coverages and the team drafted Emmanuel Forbes over the likes of Christian Gonzalez because of his fit with those types of coverages. Despite the fit with zone and match coverages, Del Rio has seemingly insisted on play man coverage, which has left his players in bad spots.
He frequently left young cornerbacks like Forbes on an island against the likes of A.J. Brown, resulting in Brown racking up 17 catches for 305 yards and four touchdowns across the Commanders two games against him this season. Even this past game, Del Rio called a ton of man coverage against the Cowboys and put the likes of Benjamin St-Juste and Quan Martin in tough positions.
On this play, the Cowboys align two receivers to the right with CeeDee Lamb outside and Brandon Cooks in the slot. The Commanders respond by matching up man to man, leaving St-Juste in the slot against a quick receiver like Cooks. It was only a week ago that Giants receiver Isaiah Hodgins explained how the Giants looked to target the Commanders long corners, like St-Juste, with shorter, quicker receivers, and yet in the next game, here’s St-Juste being asked to cover a shorter, quicker receiver in man coverage.
Now that being said, St-Juste and safety Percy Butler both play this poorly and should be doing better. St-Juste allows a free release inside off the snap and fails to get his hands on the receiver to try and disrupt his route. That allows Cooks to burst past him as he releases inside and then gets vertical. With a step on St-Juste, Cooks then sells a nice fake outside before sharply cutting back inside towards the post. St-Juste has been beaten on this type of route a few times this year where he bites too heavily on the fake once he’s in a trail position. The Cowboys were certainly aware of that, hence why they called this particular play.
Butler, as the single deep safety, also messes up here. He bites far too heavily on the fake outside and should really be looking to stay in the middle of the field and play the route inside-out. Instead, he looks to stay on top of the route as Cooks breaks outside, vacating the middle of the field which Cooks then breaks back into.
Both players have to take responsibility for the touchdown here as both had bad reps on the play. But Del Rio also is largely at fault for putting these players in that position in the first place. The quote from Giants receiver Isaiah Hodgins was still fresh from Sunday when the Commanders put together their gameplan for this game and despite having been burned by playing so much man coverage and having opposition players opening talking about how they looked to attack certain players in man coverage, Del Rio went right back to it a few days later.
Later in the game, Del Rio left rookie defensive back Quan Martin, a player the team was refusing to play earlier in the season despite being a second-round pick, one-on-one in the slot against CeeDee Lamb. It went about as well as you would expect…
This is a pretty nice play design by the Cowboys here. They line up Lamb in the slot and send him on a return motion, where he starts to cross the field but then returns back to his original spot. Quan Martin aligns in the slot over Lamb initially and follows him as he goes in motion. This gives the Cowboys a pretty good pre-snap indication that the Commanders are in man coverage, and if that is the case then obviously they want to work to their best receiver, Lamb, against a defensive back that the Commanders wouldn’t be using if it wasn’t for injuries.
To add insult to injury, the Cowboys send Lamb on a bit of a double move. The play is designed to look like the classic F-Post concept, also known as Arches in the Shanahan coaching tree or Quick Seam in the Gruden tree. The tight end runs a shallow cross inside to grab the coverage and vacate space for the slot receiver to break inside on a slant. However, the Cowboys add a twist, with Lamb flipping back outside after the fake inside. Martin does a pretty solid job trying to stay with Lamb, but he’s obviously out matched and can’t prevent him from breaking free and scoring another touchdown.
Leaving St-Juste in man coverage is one thing. St-Juste is at least in his third season in the league, so he has some experience and was always going to be one of the top corners on this team this season. But to expose Martin, who again was a player the team didn’t want to play after his struggles in preseason and is only playing now due to injury, to a situation where he’s one-on-one in man coverage against one of the best receivers in the league down in the red zone is coaching malpractice.
So I suspect with Del Rio now gone, Rivera will revert back to some basic zone coverages which his defenses have historically been known for. Even in the Cowboys game, we saw how much more effective zone coverage was for this defense.
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