One Fan(n)’s Opinion: A Deep Dive Into Rex’s Sack Situation

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As the Bills prepare to take on the Jacksonville Jaguars in London, a bit of bother (if I can pull a little U.K. parlance) has emerged regarding the usage of the team-nicknamed “Cold Front”. Most notably, the lack of sacks in 6 games this year (9) vs last year (19) has become the topic of the week. Rather than just dog pile onto the criticism, I wanted to take a look myself at Rex prior to his time in Buffalo to see what’s going wrong with the scheme. However, as you’ll see in a moment there isn’t much going “wrong”, except for our perception of what Rex brings with his “Rex Ryan Defense”.

Pressure and the Illusion of Pressure Doesn’t Always Equal Sacks

This chart below shows the points per game, sacks and leading sack artist of the Rex Ryan coached Ravens (as Defensive Coordinator) and Jets (as Head Coach/you know he’s running that Defense too). The information was all of this article was provided by checking out Pro Football Reference.

Looking at this information, while the Ryan defenses have been known for pressure, I will speak for myself and say that sacks were certainly conflated with that. You’ll also note that as the Jets teams got older/less talented, his points per game went up. Additionally, I noted that Rex has never in his career had a 10+ sack squad like the “Cold Front” to work with and that’s both a good and bad thing. It’s good, because that means he can put them in creative positions to win at the point of attack and get one on one’s. But the bad negates that – Rex has always has sprinkled in with his sack masters his role players – and with this group of guys, having one of them relegated to “role player” puts the players in the positions they’re in media wise. If you’re Mario Williams, Dareus, Kyle Williams and Hughes, you’re sitting on contracts that are mentioned

every.

single.

article.

and you know, heck WE KNOW that if / when those numbers aren’t duplicated there will be comments made. More articles written. Rage in the fanbase, goo in the streets…Wait, that’s Ghost Busters 2.

I digress.

Looking at this data and because of my obsession with Rex, he has used his ROLB/Pass Rusher (Hughes) with his LDE (Mario) as his engines of sack acquisition most of his career. The nose (Dareus), even when it was a monster like Ngata maxed out at 3 sacks. His 1/3 technique (Kyle) has typically also been a try-hard 5 like Mike DeVito and maxed out at 1 sack in a season. Ryan provides pressure from different “levels” (DL-LB-Secondary) and because of the constant movement that pressure typically allows for an errant throw or a sack, trending more towards the errant throws. Having this many good players on one “level” is relatively a luxury for him, which is why you see so many drops by each of the “Cold Front” members.

However, if you have a defense that’s based on Rex’s scheme but with another person’s view on it (*cough cough Pettine cough cough*) you see a season like 2013 with the Bills. Getting 13 sacks (Mario), 10 sacks (Kyle and Jerry) and 7.5 sacks (Dareus) happened because Pettine was hell-bent on proving (which he did) that while he learned a lot from Rex in their time together, he was his own man defensively (think Obi Wan and Vader). Heck, even in Pettine’s first year as Browns head coach, the leading sack guys were Defensive End, OLB/Pass Rusher and ILB – system, system, system.

For the Bills and Rex, I’m interested in seeing how well things “work” in the system with Kyle Williams out injured and Stefan Charles/Carrington and Bryant now in the rotation. They will be less focused on fan/media wise, which makes sense that they would/could embrace the needed 2 gap role to free up the rest of the starters. If the NFL doesn’t sue us into oblivion I’ll add some gifs and v-

(tackled by Buffalo Wins legal)

Apparently, I’ll be only posting screen shots. So there’s that.

Tackling Another Pressing Issue

My second thought after looking at the sack numbers was to look at tackling statistics of Ryan teams. From 2005 to 2014, his leading tacklers were (by position): R/L inside linebacker, Free Safety, Strong Safety and then what I call “shifting player x” – which would be an Outside linebacker like Adalius Thomas whose position was legion. The safeties being that high makes sense with Rex’s usage of big nickel / dime sets with his defense. A corner was, at highest 4th and lowest 7th in that time span (with an average position of 6th). In Buffalo, his 2nd(Darby), 5th (Gilmore) and 6th(Robey) leading tacklers are corners, with Graham taking the top spot and Brown/Bradham tied for 3rd.

We’ve discussed ad nauseum the missed tackles the Bills have had during games and these tackling stats stand out as a great empirical to marry with that. That lack of sure tackling may be why Rex has eschewed a lot of pressure, because he wants to make sure they’re multiple actors to stop a player on any given play. From Rex’s perspective, if you call a perfect blitz and the only guy that needs to clean up a catch misses it for a 50+ yard TD (See Bradham vs Jets) or 20 yard TD (IK vs Bengals) you gotta throw your hands up, right?

With the talent he has and the pressure the team is under to succeed (and quick) I think Rex will adapt, a little at least. For him to be expected to change his entire mindset, which as you see in the chart above has been successful is both unfair and unrealistic. What I think we should expect is a little more trust in the secondary (particularly since they’re in the top 4 tackling anyway) and for Rex to send more pressure, even if he feels uncomfortable. The death of a thousand cuts gimmick is getting old.

Finally, Rex noted to Tyler Dunne in his press conference yesterday:

Ryan joked that his defense has never come under this kind of scrutiny before.

“I think when I was at Morehead State many years ago, it was that one writer there,” Ryan said. “I make fun of it because I know where it’s going to end up. I’d be willing to bet anybody who wants to bet.”

After reading the last ten year’s worth of trends I think I’ll throw my hat into the ring – top ten in yardage, 42 sacks, 20.2 or so in points per game. What say you? Hit me up at @RDotDeuce – I’m interested to see if fans/media expect Rex to change his whole philosophy that got him hired or to tweak it to allow for multiple “level sacks”.