All Twenty-Tuesday: Justin Evans

Buccaneers general manager Jason Licht caught plenty of criticism when he selected Evans, a safety from Texas A&M, in the second round of the 2017 NFL Draft. Evans, who showed top-tier athleticism in the secondary in College Station, was thought of, as some, to be more of a project player that had a lot to learn more than an early role player like being picked in the Top 50 suggests.

During training camp, Evans was running with then-strong safety J.J Wilcox on the second team. The two were clearly the backup safeties to Crhis Conte and Keith Tandy as the starters, and that was kind of that. But when the signing of T.J. Ward and the trading of Wilcox went down, the long-term plan of grooming Evans as a starter began to accelerate.

As injuries happened to both Tandy and Ward at Minnesota, Evans was able to get his first start last Thursday, and to the surprise of many of his criticism, he was one of the best defensive players the Bucs had on the field. Evans ended the game second on the team in tackles with nine and got the first interception of his career – against future Hall of Famer Tom Brady, mind you.

In a starting role, Evans played with much more confidence and instincts than we’d seen to that point. Here’s what that looked like, and what it means for his next step.

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Let’s start with a little baseline for safety play since the roles for each safety is something we’re going to build off of and reference.

Evans is the safety in the middle of the field close to the top of your screen and Conte is the other safety more towards the bottom. Evans, on this play, is playing the role of a “free safety,” which is usually the safety who is responsible for covering deep passes. Conte is playing as the “strong safety” here, which is used more at the linebacker level to help with run defense if it’s a run play, or help with routes over that short-to-intermediate middle of the field.

Think about each of those roles and the type of players that would go with them. At free safety, you want a player that has good acceleration and speed to be able to cover a lot of ground for deep passes, and you also want these players to have good ball skills to get the takeaway and play the ball in the air. Strong safeties, since they’re closer to the action most of the time, will be asked to be tacklers more and will, by nature, be more physical. So, for this role you’d want a player with a somewhat larger frame who can handle physicality.

Knowing that, Evans fits as a free safety, and his athleticism gives the team the potential to just use him back in coverage instead of having to use two safeties because of how much ground he can cover – this would allow a strong safety to be used more definitively to help the linebackers as opposed to always playing a “two deep” safety look because neither can cover enough ground. This is why Evans was brought to Tampa.

Right now we know that defensive coordinator Mike Smith likes to use his safeties “interchangeably,” meaning one play one of them might be a free safety, and on the next play they can switch roles. This comes off as a compliment and diverse at first, but it’s not something you want to be running as much as they do, and might actually be a statement that says neither of the starters, Conte and Tandy, possess elite enough traits to be dominant at one or the other.

Evans brings the potential to be an ideal free safety, one you can leave on their own who can cover a ton of ground, if his instincts and preparation keep up with his athletic gifts. Keep that in mind going forward.

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Evans’ interception is kind of funny, because he actually didn’t do exactly what he was supposed to at first and it worked out in his favor.

As you see in the clip above, Evans was playing that free safety role. As the ball was hiked, he immediately retreated. When he saw the slot player coming over the middle, he broke quick, which was good. But then he hesitated and stopped and it actually work, because him being late to his receiver actually bought him the time to be able to leap back and grab the ball.

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That kind of athleticism from Evans is what we’re talking about when we say he has the potential to be elite and make elite plays.

But, can we pause for a second and talk about just what the heck the linebackers and Conte were doing? Was this by design? A fake blitz into no-man’s land? Against Tom Brady?

Yikes.

Either you all-out blitz him or you drop back. What they all did accomplished nothing but maybe confuse the offensive line, but not really. Whatever it is, they shouldn’t do that again. In reality, that play should have gone for a 15-yard catch.

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The play above is an area where I think Evans is playing out of position due to the interchangeable safety roles. Thankfully for Evans it was an errant pass.

Evans gets burned on the play, but really, there’s no chance at stopping it when you’re asking a safety to play that far off and guard a receiver.

If Tampa Bay had more definitive roles in their secondary, it could switch where Conte and Evans were playing and, in theory, have a player like Ward be the team’s strong safety and play at the line of scrimmage. This way he could be more physical with the receiver and funnel him into the middle while giving himself a chance to stay stride-for-stride with him.

In the design they have Evans playing in above, he’s a sitting duck.

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The Patriots actually gave us a good example of how to be more definitive with your safeties.

The Patriots defense, as are most good defenses (I know, I know, the Pats have one of the worst defense in the NFL statistically this year, but that’s not because they don’t play things right), is aggressive and pretty much just say, “This is what we’re doing, and we’re better than you.”

In the play above, there was no attempt at mystery with the safeties; one was dropping back and one was helping over the middle. Because of this, both were able to step towards their spots with authority. The strong safety helped underneath over the middle and the deep free safety almost came up with the interception.

That’s what it can look like with more definitive roles, something I think Tampa Bay should consider.

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I want to round out this first little review on Evans with some progressions on instincts.

In the play above, Evans was responsible for the player running the out route to the sideline. I think he took an aggressive enough line initially, and was pretty close to his man when the ball was thrown. However, the catch was made.

Later in the game, however, he almost got pick number two on that same sort of look.

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It wasn’t the exact same set up, but it did call for Evans to come down from his safety spot and cover a player who was running an out route. After seeing it before, Evans knew when the pass would be coming his way, and jumped on it to bat it away and almost come up with the interception.

Evans played a confident game on Thursday, and his stats and his film showed that. There was one or two tackles he missed, but playing safety you expect that. he also showed great closing speed and nice hitting power on a few others.

The Bucs’ second-round pick has the build and the skills to be a prototype free safety, but now it’s all about upstairs. The question now becomes: what he can do building off this game? I think Evans’ performance warranted consideration to start, even once Ward and Tandy are back healthy.

If Evans can build off this and become better and better at anticipating quarterbacks’ throws and getting into the right positions, he might soon be the best chance at some takeaways through the air this defense desperately needs.

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