Under pressure; The Chiefs pass rush is starting to heat up
Examining how Chris Jones and company had Justin Herbert on the run most of Sunday evening, and how everyone is stepping up to help the superstar DL.
A little over a month ago, I wrote about the Chiefs’ pass rush following their win over the Raiders. I looked at every snap Steve Spagnuolo’s crew played getting after Derek Carr, and I came away with both good news and bad news.
The good news was that the Chiefs were pressuring Carr more than I’d realized on first watch. The bad news was that they were doing it almost exclusively through blitzing, stunts/twists along the line, or “Chris Jones does something crazy” plays.
Why was that bad news? To say it quickly, blitzing and defensive line games aren’t always reliable as ways to get consistent pressure, and they come with risks. A blitz, by its very nature, leaves some open area of the field for a QB to exploit if he sees it coming or the protection picks it up. Stunts/twists, if handled correctly by the OL, create a situation where defensive lineman aren’t able to execute any real pass rush “moves” given that they start off moving away from the QB (so they are a feast or famine form of rushing). And, of course, no matter how good Chris Jones is, no pass rusher can do it alone.
In short, the way that the Chiefs were getting pressure wasn’t consistently sustainable over the course of a full game or multiple games, especially against high-level quarterbacks.
Fast forward to late(ish) November, and things have started to look a little different.
A little over halfway through the season, and the Chiefs (shoutout to Craig Stout with our friends at
) are currently tied 4th in the NFL in sacks. They’re also ranked 5th in the league in Pro Football Reference’s “pressure percentage,” which combines pressures/hits/sacks to look at how often a team is affecting the opposing quarterback.What’s even more interesting to me, though, isn’t the “what” (good pressure percentages) but rather the “how” with the Chiefs pass rush over the last several weeks. And that “how” was on full display Sunday against the Los Angeles Chargers, as Kansas City’s pass rush affected the game multiple times… without necessarily having to constantly rely on blitzing or executing stunts constantly.
I went back and looked at every pass rush snap for the defense, charting their pressures and how they happened. And what I found gives me hope for Spagnuolo’s crew, which seems to be starting to hit its stride getting after the passer. Let’s talk about how they won against the Chargers and what makes it, on the surface, look more sustainable than the way they were getting pressure earlier in the year.