For Commanders’ defense to progress, rush and coverage must work together

In interviews throughout training camp, players and coaches were steadfast but measured. Last year, defensive end Chase Young predicted he and Sweat might break the duo sack record, but after those brazen expectations spilled into public view during a season of regression, defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio opened this year’s camp by preaching a message of humility.

Unanimously, his players have echoed it. Some acknowledged the team has talent and should play well, but as for expectations, cornerback Benjamin St-Juste summed up his thoughts succinctly: “F all that.”

“Let’s approach each game with confidence,” Coach Ron Rivera said. “We don’t need the bravado.”

Now, with Sunday’s opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars fast approaching, the defense finally will get a chance to prove last season was a mirage. Despite the unit’s 2021 struggles, its mostly unchanged personnel and its poor results in the preseason, players and coaches have remained resolute in their optimism.

“We’re at a point now where … a lot of things are coming together,” Del Rio said. “We’re poised to play pretty good defense.”

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Washington’s defense followed a breakout 2020 with a letdown. In 2021, it ranked 25th in the NFL in points allowed per game (25.5) and 29th in expected points added per play (0.08). Many factors contributed to the underperformance: injuries, selfish play, lack of discipline, wholesale breakdowns on third down, infighting on the line, poor communication in the secondary and new additions who struggled to adapt to the scheme.

If the defense is a Jenga tower, then each of those problems was an important piece that had been pulled out, leaving the structure wobbling. When enough pieces disappeared on a given play, the tower tumbled. Washington often couldn’t sync its pass rush and its coverage, the most basic components of any defense.

“You can’t have a rush without coverage, and you can’t cover without a rush,” linebacker Cole Holcomb said during training camp. “We have to learn how to play off each other.”

The short of it: The rush needs the coverage to be tight to buy time so it can get to the quarterback. Should the rush fail to get there, it needs the coverage to seal the back end.

“It all works together,” safety Bobby McCain said. “… Putting it all together each game at a time is what we’re going to have to do.”

This summer, defenders and their coaches used common themes to explain the root of their renewed confidence: continuity, communication, commitment and a subtle change to the scheme. But some of the same people said similar things last year. Can this season be different?

One thing is clear: If Washington’s defense is to become greater than the sum of its parts at last, it starts with unifying the rush and the coverage.

Buying more time

The play that disturbed Rivera was a Chiefs touchdown that never should have happened. It was early in the second quarter of the Commanders’ preseason loss at Kansas City, when the Chiefs had driven into the red zone. Quarterback Patrick Mahomes, a master of escaping the pocket, was lined up in the shotgun, ready for his next trick. As he took the snap, Washington’s defensive backs stayed in tight coverage, but the line failed to contain.

Defensive end Casey Toohill washed up and over Mahomes on his rush, clearing a path for the quarterback to drift left and throw a perfect dart to tight end Jody Fortson in the corner of the end zone.

The coverage was there. But the rush lacked discipline, and the Chiefs had their second touchdown of the afternoon.

From 2021: Washington’s defensive line makes no excuses after a rough night against the Eagles

Washington has the luxury of four first-round draft picks — Young, Sweat, Daron Payne and Jonathan Allen — starting on its defensive line, a rare concentration of talent that pushed the team to the top of most defensive rankings in 2020. But last season, the team’s shortcomings were exposed. By the advanced metric DVOA, which combines a defense’s late-down conversion rate with the average distance the opposing offense faced (among other factors), Washington was by far the league’s worst unit on third and fourth downs, according to the website Football Outsiders. This preseason did little to alleviate concerns about the rushing defense: Washington was last in opponent third-down conversion rate (51.2 percent).

But there has been improvement in the details. In the first preseason game, against Carolina, the Commanders gave up an average of 2.8 yards on first and second downs, a healthy number in coverage. The line created plenty of pressure up front and should have had more than the three sacks it recorded. But the breakdowns on third down led to chunk plays and scores, making it all for naught.

“It is about production in our business,” Del Rio said. “That is what we are stressing.”

Del Rio added that his response to the poor third-down defense was not to overreact, largely because it was the preseason and the team purposely didn’t show all of its cards. Washington has tweaked its system to fit its personnel, and now most defenders have a year of experience in it.

“I think [players] come in with a little more confidence,” Del Rio said. “They were here in the offseason growing together and putting in the work. … Our communication, our knowledge and our understanding of the principles that we play with is much stronger right now.”

Washington believes its line has complementary skill sets to give it flexibility, which is a silver lining of injuries that have at times tripped up the unit. Late last year when Young was out with a torn ACL and throughout this preseason, the team relied on James Smith-Williams and Toohill to step up at end. Smith-Williams, a seventh-round pick in 2020, has moved primarily outside on the line this year, but he has the versatility to play inside, too. Toohill, meanwhile, has the flexibility to drop into coverage.

But compensating for Young, Washington’s star end who will miss at least four games while recovering from his knee injury, will be a challenge. Young’s power and presence can prompt the offense to direct more resources to handling him, leaving rush lanes open for others. Without him, will the defensive line still be able to pressure the quarterback? Or will his absence create more pressure on the secondary?

Del Rio has a history of turning fledgling defenses into top-tier groups, and he has worked with a number of the game’s top pass rushers, including Von Miller and DeMarcus Ware with Denver and Khalil Mack with Oakland. To jump-start the defense, the Commanders may show concepts from Del Rio’s past and mix in more five-man fronts this season, especially while they’re without Young.

Doing so would create more options. The defense could go with a heavy interior featuring Payne, Allen and second-round pick Phidarian Mathis; it could use three ends and two tackles to add more speed to the mix; or it could pair the five-man front with a nickel package on the back end.

But the true value of Washington’s defense will be measured by how cohesively its rush works with its coverage.

Stickier coverage

As many successful defenses have in recent years, Washington tried to stifle the NFL’s most explosive offenses last season by playing top-down coverage, often with two safeties deep and a lot of soft zones. The goal was to reduce the amount of space the offense could target downfield and force the quarterback to be patient — to make short throw after short throw.

That defensive style rests on the assumption that the quarterback will grow impatient and force a throw deep or struggle to sustain lengthy, methodical drives, which history shows is difficult to do consistently.

But for Washington, there was a big problem: Opposing offenses were able to sustain long drives, in large part because the pass defense on third and fourth downs was horrendous.

In the past decade, only 12 defenses were as bad against late-down passes as Washington was in 2021, according to Football Outsiders. All 12 rebounded significantly the following season, and the worst-case defense still cut its DVOA in half. So if history is a good predictor, statistical regression should help the Commanders this season.

Washington’s hopes for improved coverage are based on a more cohesive secondary and an ability to disguise its plans with versatile, three-safety sets. The team also will use a more diverse mix of schemes than last year, when it played cover-three or cover-four on 53 percent of its snaps, per the website TruMedia.

“We’re going to be able to do multiple things and mess with the quarterback so he’s not so comfortable,” Del Rio said.

In the preseason, the defense seemed to play less pure zone and more matchup zone, which incorporates man-to-man principles. In a matchup zone, defenders drop to spots, just as they do in pure zone coverage — but when a receiver enters a defender’s area, he matches him, as in man coverage. The challenge of playing matchup zone is getting defenders to anticipate when to pick up assignments — and when to pass them off.

“You have to take the time to teach the eyes,” Cody Alexander, a longtime defensive coach and writer of the MatchQuarters newsletter, said of matchup zone. “That’s the most important thing that you’re going to have to do: ‘Where’s my key, and who am I matching?’ ”

Alexander added that, though matchup zone has recently become more popular in the NFL, some coaches shy away because teaching it is a significant time investment. But this spring, Washington’s defense had a full offseason program for the first time in three years.

Though the adjustment wasn’t a big deal to some of the Commanders’ defenders, it has helped two in particular look more comfortable and decisive. Both played mostly man coverage before joining Washington last season.

“I was ecstatic,” cornerback William Jackson III said of the uptick in matchup zone. “It was still zone, but it’s something I’m familiar with.”

“I was like, ‘Let’s f—ing go,’ ” linebacker Jamin Davis said, pumping his fist. “Time to play faster and make some plays.”

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One example of matchup coverage came in the first quarter of that preseason game at Kansas City. On third and six, the Chiefs ran a concept called mesh, which includes two receivers running crossing routes from opposite sides of the field. Washington played zone, but when the crossers entered Davis’s and Holcomb’s zones, each linebacker stuck to his man and trailed him across the field.

Ultimately, that gave the line a better chance to record a sack. But Mahomes evaded the pressure and threw a side-armed dot to wide receiver Justin Watson, who had spun away from Holcomb, for a 14-yard gain. It was a reminder that, even when the rush and coverage work together, sometimes the plan just doesn’t pan out — especially against one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks.

No matter which coverage Washington plays, one key to being more effective is disguise. Last season, the defense excelled when its three safeties — Kam Curl, McCain and Landon Collins — lined up in one look before the snap and rotated to a different one after it. In Washington’s upset of Tampa Bay, that disguise keyed the first of two interceptions of Tom Brady.

This year, the Commanders figure to continue using safeties in coverage at one of the league’s highest rates. The group is rangier and more athletic following the release of Collins, the emergence of second-year player Darrick Forrest and the addition of Percy Butler in the draft.

There’s now more trust among the unit as well, several safeties said. Jeremy Reaves pointed out that he has learned the nuances of how his teammates like to play over hundreds of reps. Forrest prefers to be aggressive; McCain is a ball-hawking deep safety. Sometimes Reaves can identify an offensive tendency before the snap and tell the cornerback to play more aggressively against a double move by the receiver because he can provide support over the top.

Those are the most tangible benefits of communication. When Curl is on the field with McCain, they can read the opposing offense and adjust play-calls to be more advantageous by what Curl called “cutting each other,” or switching responsibilities.

“We have the freedom to do that in this defense,” Curl said. “Coaches are like, ‘Just get the play done.’ Somebody got to be here; somebody got to be there. Just get it done.”

In the preseason, perhaps the best sign of the progress the coverage has made was when a quarterback started to throw but halted. It was a signal that the coverage he identified before the snap had changed — or that Commanders defenders were stickier to the receivers than the quarterback had hoped.

Either way, those hitches brought heat. They added fractions of a second to plays and gave the line a chance to rack up sacks and quarterback hits.

Sometimes, such as on that third and six against the Chiefs, the line couldn’t convert. But that play highlighted the progress Washington has made and the room it has left to grow. The handful of examples of stickier coverage and menacing pass rush from the preseason add up to a modest pile of evidence that the defenders and their coaches really can turn words into results.

Recently, McCain was asked why fans should believe this change would translate to the field. He paused. He knows, like everyone else, how high the stakes are. What makes him so sure that this is the year the defense — the rush and the coverage — is for real?

“I mean, it has to be,” he said. “If you’re not on the same page, you have no chance.”