Where does Chase Young stand with the Commanders entering the 2023 season?
Examining how Chase Young played after returning from injury and what to expect from him in 2023
Chase Young has become one of the most discussed players among the Washington Commanders fanbase this offseason. The team opted to decline his fifth year option, meaning Young is now scheduled to be a free agent after this season. Young hasn’t managed to fulfill the promise and potential of being the second overall pick back in 2020, in large part due to his knee injury but there have been other factors involved too.
Young made headlines again recently when he decided not to attend voluntary minicamps and OTAs. To me that’s not as big a deal as it’s being made out to be because these practices are about installing the system and learning the terminology, but Young has been in the system for a number of years now and probably doesn’t need the refresher, as much as ideally the team would like him to be there. If he’s off working with a private pass rushing coach improving his technique, that’s probably a better use of his time.
With so much talk around Chase Young, I figured I’d go back and all of his snaps from last year to get an idea of where he’s at on the field and what we can expect from him going into this season. He only managed to play in the final three games of the season after taking a little longer than expected to fully recover from his knee injury. It was clear to see that there was a little bit of tentativeness in regards to fully trusting his knee, which I think is to be expected.
This play comes from his first game back against the 49ers. The 49ers run a zone scheme with a tight end sifting back across the line to kick out Young on the back side of the run. These types of plays are ones that can be dangerous for defensive ends because tight ends know they typically can’t block a defensive end one-on-one. So they either have to surprise them or try to block them by diving at their hip. Those cut blocks can be very dangerous because if they get them just slightly wrong, they can hit the knee instead of the hip and cause serious damage to the defender.
On this play, you can see Young spots the sifting tight end, but instead of being aggressive and meeting him in the backfield, he holds his position and lets the tight end come towards him before jumping around him to avoid the block. Schematically, this is fine. Young did his responsibility within the system and held the edge just fine. But it’s not the explosive, play-making version of Young that we saw in 2020.
Now I think it’s understandable that Young would be tentative in this type of situation. It’s going to take some time for him to fully regain trust in his knee and stop being protective of it. As he played more, we could see that mental block being worked through by Young, but still there in some capacity.
A week later against the Browns, Young faced a very similar situation. He’s on the back side of a run with the tight end sifting across to block him on the edge. This time Young is a lot more aggressive in working down the line and penetrating into the backfield, causing the tight end to have to hurry up to get across and cut him off. However, once the tight end gets there, Young shows some slight tentativeness still. Yes he drops his shoulder and hits the tight end, standing him up, but he also peels off just a bit, knowing that he’s done his job on the play by squeezing the back side of the run and forcing the ball to the other side.
This is a step forward from the week before because he was more aggressive in working down the line, but it’s still not the Chase Young that we saw before the injury, where he was never content to just do his part, he wanted to make the play and knew he was capable of doing so.
This is a clip of a similar style of play from the end of Young’s rookie season back in 2020. The Panthers have a tight end sift back across the line to try and kick out Young on the back side of the run. This is where you can see the difference between Young before the injury and Young after the injury last year. As soon as the ball is snapped, Young spots the tight end sifting, works down the line to meet him and then attacks his inside shoulder. That enables him to blow up the tight end’s block and emerge out of it in a perfect position to make a play on the running back.
That’s the type of play Chase Young is capable of making when he’s playing completely free and without fear of injuring his knee. That’s the level of play that made him worthy of the second overall pick, going beyond what his responsibility was and doing more to make the play himself instead of leaving it to others. Obviously you don’t want him to just be freelancing and leaving holes for the offense to take advantage of, but in 2020 he was excellent at picking his moments and being aggressive in making plays in big situations, like this one down at the goal line.
So step one for Chase Young this season is to try and get back to playing free and not worrying about the knee. That is obviously a lot easier said than done and will require him to work through any mental block and doubts he might have about his knee holding up, but he’ll need to put in that work to get through that mental side of things in order to return to the standard of player he’s capable of being still.
The second step for Young is to be more assertive with his pass rush. In 2021 before his injury, Ron Rivera mentioned a number of times he wanted Young to be more aggressive and assertive when rushing as Young has a tendency to slow his rush down with a stutter move that buys offensive lineman time to catch up and gives quarterbacks a chance to get rid of the ball. After coming back from the injury last season, that stutter step move still appeared quite often in his game.
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