It’s was a rocky road to the NFL for the Bucs’ Jamel Dean, a road that included knee injuries in both his junior and senior season of high school before being deemed medically ineligible after enrolling early at Ohio State.
Dean then transferred to Auburn where he would suffer yet another knee injury before playing two full seasons with the Tigers, before a 4.3 40-yard dash at the NFL Scouting Combine, before overcoming the odds and landing with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the third round of the 2019 NFL Draft.
That road led him to Seattle in Week 9, his first career start, where he was thrown into the starting lineup minutes before kickoff after an injury to Carlton Davis. Dean was burned all afternoon after playing just three defensive snaps over the course of the Bucs’ first eight games. But from the ashes at the end of that road emerged one of the most dominant defensive backs in the NFL over the final six weeks of the 2019 season.
From a physical standpoint, Dean is as gifted as you could ask for at the position.
Standing 6-foot-1, his height is in the 81st percentile for cornerbacks. Weighing in at 206 pounds, his weight put him in the 92nd percentile for the position. His 77-inch wingspan, in the 70th percentile.
When looking at his athleticism, you’ll see much of the same.
While he posted a below average three-cone drill and 20-yard shuttle, his blazing 40-yard dash time landed him in the 98th percentile, his 41-inch vertical jump landed him in the 95th and his 130 inch broad jump landed him in the 92nd.
Elite size, length and explosiveness, in addition to his experience playing press man coverage alongside Davis at Auburn, made him a seemingly perfect weapon for defensive coordinator Todd Bowles’ aggressive defense, but it takes much more than God-given ability and stellar metrics to make it in the NFL.
Dean learned that the hard way.
Against Seattle Dean was bullied. He looked a step behind all day, including in the clip below, when he was caught flat-footed on a double move from Tyler Lockett, allowing his first of three touchdowns on the day. He played rigid and his coverage looked like forced reactions – and almost confusion at times – more than instinct.
“After last week, I realized I had to prepare differently,” Dean said. “The whole week, I’m watching extra film, I’m going up to Coach [Todd] Bowles’ office, just going over film and letting him teach me the game, because honestly, I didn’t want to have that feeling I did last week.”
Luckily for Dean, he had one of the league’s finest defensive minds, a former defensive back himself, in Bowles to lean on.
Dean was once again thrown into the Bucs’ lineup on short notice the following week against Arizona after Vernon Hargreaves III was benched due to a lack of hustle, according to head coach Bruce Arians. The situation was similar, but the results were starkly different.
Often when a new defensive back enters the game, an offense wants to attack that side of the field quickly, taking advantage of the fact that the player may be entering the game “cold” or unprepared. Dean had other plans.
Here Dean shows his ability to flip his hips smoothly in off coverage, change direction on a dime and take advantage of his length to play around the receiver for a pass breakup. That kind of explosiveness when left alone on the outside is rare for a big corner.
The confidence gained from his extra preparation was evident and the tools at Dean’s disposal were there from the start, but with a little experience and productive film study under his belt, he was quickly able to tap into some of that potential.
Following his disastrous performance in Seattle, Dean allowed just one reception to Larry Fitzgerald for a loss of two yards on five targets against Arizona. He also broke up two passes and came up with the game-saving interception in the fourth quarter off of quarterback Kyler Murray, the first of his career, that allowed Tampa Bay’s offense to drive the field and take the lead.
Dean earned a coverage grade of 95.6 against Arizona, per Pro Football Focus, and his overall defensive grade of 95.5 led all defenders in Week 10.
By Week 12, Hargreaves had been released and Dean slid into a full-time starting role as an outside cornerback across from his college teammate Davis, with fellow rookie Sean Murphy-Bunting taking over the nickel corner role.
In his Week 9 matchup against the Seahawks, Dean allowed nine receptions on 14 targets for 155 yards and three receiving touchdowns in coverage.
Over the remainder of the season, from Week 10 against the Cardinals until Week 17 against the Falcons, Dean allowed a completion percentage of just 36.3 percent when quarterbacks threw in his direction for 134 yards and no touchdowns while racking up seven pass breakups and two interceptions. These are absolutely mind-boggling defensive numbers.
Even including the Seattle game, Dean posted one of the lowest completion percentages allowed across the league last season at 48.9 percent. To put that in perspective, defensive player of the year Stephon Gilmore allowed a completion percentage of 49 percent and Dean also had 10 pass breakups compared to Gilmore’s 13, despite being targeted in coverage just 47 times to Gilmore’s 96.
Against Atlanta in Week 12, Dean spent most of the day lined up across from the speedy Calvin Ridley, the Falcons’ first-round pick in 2018.
The play below was another example of Dean (lined up at the top of the screen) succeeding in off coverage. As fellow Pewter Report writer Jon Ledyard told me while watching film, the the hardest place to defend Ridley is at the top of his routes. But Dean was able to come out of his backpedal smoothly and adjust to a route where Ridley lost very little speed after a subtle inside fake. That’s impressive balance and agility to mirror this route break and knock the ball away.
On the play below, Tampa Bay’s defense was facing the same formation that Atlanta had used in the red zone earlier in the day, with Dean lined up in man coverage across from Ridley again.
On Atlanta’s prior attempt out of this 3×1 formation (three receivers to the left side of the field, one receiver to the right,) a hitch route to Ridley was broken up by Davis and Dean. Here Ridley bolts across the formation after the snap to try and break free from Dean’s coverage in the sea of defensive players, but Dean races through the traffic and plays straight through Ridley to break up the pass.
Below is another example of Dean eating up Ridley in coverage. Here he uses the boundary as an extra defender, maintaining outside leverage by shading the receiver’s outside shoulder. He’s then able to muscle up on Ridley, impact his route break and knock away his third pass of the day.
Dean allowed just three receptions for 33 yards on nine targets against the Falcons.
On this play against the Lions in Week 15, Tampa Bay was running Cover 2 against the Lions’ empty set. Playing on the field side, Dean is tasked with sinking off the snap, but in position to break on anything in the flats. Dean wins again, reading and breaking on the ball cleanly to force another incompletion.
And on Dean’s second and final interception of the 2019 season, he uses pure speed – with no safety help over the top – to cover another dangerous vertical threat in Kenny Stills. Dean takes away the outside of the field again, reminiscent of the play shown earlier against Ridley, but this time Stills stays vertical. Dean doesn’t lose a single step on the go route and makes a great play on the ball for the takeaway just before halftime.
In just five starts, Dean became the only rookie in the NFL last year to combine for more than 10 pass breakups and interceptions. In just five starts, Dean became a staple in the Bucs’ defense, a defense that allowed 290.9 passing yards per game and 31.3 points per game over the first 10 games of the season before dropping those numbers to 235.5 passing yards and 22.6 points allowed per game over the final six games of the season.
In an admittedly small sample size of just five starts and half a season’s worth of games, Dean transitioned into one of the toughest defensive backs to beat in the NFL. If he can avoid a sophomore slump in 2020 and pick up where he left off last season, let alone improve, Dean could be a significant cornerstone for the Bucs’ highly-anticipated defensive lineup.
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