All-Twenty Tuesday: The Bucs’ Blitz

Under Mike Smith the Buccaneers defense became extremely vanilla. Bucs fans get triggered just when they heard the words “quarters coverage” from the 2017 campaign, and things this season were different, but not different enough.

The Bucs have called different kinds of coverages and some different alignments in their front seven this year, but not to a different execution most of the time.

There have been a few times, however, where the Bucs have totally gone away from what they normally do up front and have given an exotic look. You know what the results were from those two times, to be exact?

Two sacks.

Last week against the Falcons, the lone sack of the game, finished by Jason Pierre-Paul, came from an exotic 3-3-5 look.

In it, as shown above, there was all sorts of spacial chaos pre-snap, and then when the bodies started flying, there was so much confusion on the offensive line on who to pick up that JPP eventually got home.

Did that look (and result) look familiar? It should!

The Bucs ran that same exact look (with a slightly different modification) two weeks ago in Chicago and it resulted in a sack. That play has been 2-for-2 with sacks, but we only saw it twice.

Why?

I understand that you can’t quite get that crazy every time, but the theme of why that play worked should have been re-occurring a lot more than it has been this season, and a lot more than it had been over the past three years under Smith.

The only way you win on defense in this league it to make the quarterback uncomfortable. The only way you accomplish that is by first making the offensive line uncomfortable and for way too long Smith made things too comfortable and predictable for opposing offensive lines. That’s where the creativity has to come in as a defensive coordinator, and Smith showed over the course of three years that he wasn’t willing to do that enough.

So now the question becomes: Will interim defensive coordinator Mark Duffner be creative enough?

As a linebackers coach, that creativity, if we see it, will likely come from the use of the linebackers, specifically Lavonte David and Kwon Alexander. In 2017, neither David nor Alexander had a single sack, but the year before they had eight between them. That should give you some hope.

Alexander had three sacks in 2016, but two of them were really more of being in the right place at the right time. His final sack of the year in the Seattle game, however, was due to a great call.

A-gap (up the middle) pressure can be a killer for an offensive line. When you blitz with two linebackers up the middle, you’re really overloading the work of each interior offensive lineman, who normally have help with their assignments. Instead, you’re forcing all three in the middle to win their one-on-one matchups, and if they don’t the quarterback will be flushed out of the pocket into the waiting arms of a defensive end, as a result. This can sometimes result in broken plays and long scrambles. But, when paired with the right coverage, it can also lead to potential sacks, as seen above.

That particular play was paired with tight man coverage. When you A-gap blitz and play tight man coverage, most of the time the quarterback has to either hit his first read or scramble. On that play, the coverage was good enough in the first two seconds to warrant a no-throw, and by the time Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson found some daylight, Alexander was all over him.

We didn’t see enough pairings of A-gap and man coverage from the Buccaneers in 2017 or in the early parts of 2018. It should be a staple of an aggressive defense (the only kind of defense that gives you a chance).

As for David, his best pressures seemed to come from the outside during that 2016 season.

While walking around the line of scrimmage, as seen above, David’s blitz was one that the offensive line did not expect at all. It was the chaotic movement before the snap and the spacial alignment of the defensive line that made that one possible.

One of David’s sacks in the Carolina game in the final week of the 2016 season came from a very similar call as the one above in the Cowboys game. McCoy shuffles into the right side A gap from the left side A gap right before the snap to cause some confusion, then he loops back to the left. Defensive end Robert Ayers lines up wide, comes straight to freeze the left tackle, then crashes hard inside, forcing the guard and the running back to pick him up. That allows David to zoom past the frozen left tackle to sack Cam Newton while the back was busy doubling Ayers with the guard.

David’s waltz over to the side of the line of scrimmage made him undetected and ultimately unaccounted for as he rushed the pocket. When you walk around before the snap and when you bring extra pressure, you require the offensive line, the tight ends and the running backs to have tip-top chemistry. If they don’t (which happens a lot), you can get sacks. if you don’t get creative and test an offensive line’s chemistry, you’ll never know.

The Bucs had these kinds of plays in their pocket, and their success rates were actually high when they were called – that shows you they have the players to get it done.

But plays like that weren’t called enough.

Even when it was with all-out pressure or delayed pressure, David was often the first one to the quarterback when linebacker blitzes were called in 2016. They just weren’t called enough. Not of that kind anyways. On the play above, David and the nickel corner blitzed. The running back saw the nickel corner creep up out of the corner of his eye before the snap (look as the back immediately turns his head to the left), then realizes David is coming too, but it’s too late.

I think Duffner knows that the Bucs defense has not made the opposing teams’ offensive lines uncomfortable enough over the last few years. Hopefully he adjusts that and allows them to get creative on Sundays. Have the linebackers mover laterally pre-snap. Have the defensive line shuffle their alignment right before the snap. Create some confusion in pass protection for the offensive line and the running backs assigned to pick up the blitz.