Shawne Merriman is a busy man with his new streaming sports channel (as he has mentioned with BMitch & Finlay), but even with a Lights Out Extreme Fighting event on Saturday, he made time to pop on with Grant & Danny Thursday for some Commanders chat!
Specifically, he weighed in on the state of the Commanders’ pass rush, which has much more opportunity these days than he, one of the best to ever rush the QB, certainly had.
“It’s not easier, but you have more opportunity. I mean, they're throwing the ball 70-plus times in the game now,” Merriman said. “I remember playing the Chiefs and they had Priest Holmes back there, and Tony Richardson and Willie Roaf and Brian Waters, they were running that football 30-plus times, running powers and strong formations. Now, you can go out pin your ears back on second down because they're coming out launching the ball. So I wouldn't say easier, because tackles have gotten a lot more athletic, but you’ve got a lot more opportunity now.”
Danny agrees and thinks that’s why the quick short passing game has taken over the game to negate pass rushes, so maybe that makes it a little bit more challenging?
“The reason why that's even there is my favorite player of all time, which is Lawrence Taylor; they implemented those formations and techniques because of him. They had to get rid of the football,” Merriman said. “But it's like chess, right? You know they'll hit these quick passes, and then they're gonna start looking down the field. So as long as you as a defensive player are film ready and prepared, you know out of certain sets what they're doing, what they like to do and their tendencies, so you can just get hands up and try to bat the ball down, and that gets them out of throwing those quick passes.”
As far as the Commanders go, what does Merriman think about the strength of their defensive line being up the middle?
“It's key; I played with Jamal Williams with the Chargers and Kyle Williams with Buffalo, and let me tell you, that interior is so important as a pass rusher,” he said. “I'm not saying that they don't need a top of the line pass rush on the outside, but when you got that pressure from the inside, a lot of those guys can just run up the field and not worry about having them come up under, because they can't; those inside guys are putting so much pressure, they can't step back up in the pocket, which allows those outside guys, especially if there’s speed, to just bend the corners and get around the edge, because they can't step up in the middle. So, I'm not saying at all that not having a key pass rusher on the outside is not gonna be beneficial, but you got some pressure on the inside, you can kinda start hiding some of those weaknesses on the edge.”
So how would Merriman ideally see that set up as a defensive coordinator?
“You hope that your guys, once they’re one-on-one, can win those battles, and how you put that in action is you start bringing a safety or linebacker up in those A and B gaps,” he said. “Now, the offensive tackles and guards won’t fan protection, they're gonna at least count that inside guy as a down guy and not fan protection, which will leave that outside linebacker or pass rusher one-on-one with that tackle or maybe even a running back, and you should win those battles all day long. Wade Phillips believed that if we get our best players on one-on-one matchups, we should always win, and he was right. That's the reason why I was able to do what I did, because I was put in those situations where you couldn't get a tackle and a tight end to stick on you, or couldn't get a tight end and a running back to stay in and chip off the edge; you had to block one-on-one because we created matchup problems.”
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