I keep seeing individuals here call for more press, more man, more blitzes; and at this point, it's just getting tiresome. I wanted to do a bit of research to find out what trends look like across the league and dispel some of these ideas/notions we are playing so differently from the rest of the league or playing soft.

This is an article from PFF after our loss to the Commies last year. In it they talk about our soft zone we played and compared it to the rest of the league. I link that article because they talk about the trend of Man vs Zone from '19-'21...it was 33.9% and 66.1% respectively:

From 2019-2021, the league average for running man coverage was 33.9%, and zone was 66.1%.

With that info covered, lets look at press man. This is a bit more specific so accordingly, it was harder to find more articles and stats to compare. I did find one from a Sharp Football Analysis site that stated that in 2019, 56% of the time it was off coverage and 44% press. There accordingly was a higher completion percentage with off-man, but the tighter press also gave up bigger plays on average (I can't quote the article as it's table). I'd also like to reference some of the pros and cons...Press had a higher TO rate vs off, but they were also called for more PI's and Defensive Holdings. I do want to point out that it doesn't specify if the defense is man or zone, so there's no telling.

Going back to the same well for Blitz rates, Sharp Football Analysis has an article looking at blitz rates; and they are shockingly low. I was prepared to see low numbers, but Blitzes have been on the decline for the last decade, dropping to a low of 24.6% in '21, with only 6 teams above 30%. The article goes on to look at blitz rates among elite and rookie QBs, but for this exercise, I'm just sticking with the trends.

So, so far we've found that the league more often plays man, doesn't blitz all that often (especially against elite QBs), and is pretty split against press and off-man (despite it's pros and cons). Now let's take a look at our trends specifically...

This wasn't as difficult to find as I initially suspected; BGN had an article looking at our trends this year and has all the stats compiled and compared to our previous DC and our week 4 matchup. So far this year we've ran Man 30%, Zone 52%, and Blitzed a shockingly low 15%. Now I'm not sure where the other 18% went when looking at coverage; maybe they didn't classify downs where the offense ran. Regardless, compare those numbers to the league and we see that:

• We're in line with the league when it comes to Man
• We run zone at a lower rate than the league
• We blitz a lot less than the league

Now if you just look at our success rate, we're at our best when we play a MOFO scheme (two high safeties, typically some form of Cover 2 or Cover 0). We're slightly worse, albeit a smaller sample size, when we play man. I would suggest we run more Cover 2 than anything; that helps take away the shorter throws and it's what we are best at it would appear.

I say all of this to say this: playing press-man more isn't necessarily the answer and shouldn't be looked at to solve the short passing issues we've had; especially against the Commanders. If you want to suggest we should blitz more, I won't argue. I'd like to see a handful more blitzes in a game and get that number more comparable to the league. But we know our organization thinks we can get home with four, and historically we usually do.

I think a lot of our issues stem from, and I hate to put it all on one guy, Reddick not getting home much this year. Our two most frequent fronts (and it's not even close are 3-3-5 and 2-4-5 and one of those (2-4-5) is by far our worse front we use (it's also the second most frequent). Both those fronts rely on Reddick doing what he does from the standing OLB/EDGE position and he just hasn't gotten home...yet.

Hope this helps and generates some decent discussion! I'm at work doing this research instead of doing something more productive lol.