Assessing Washington Football Team’s safety options after Landon Collins’ injury
By Jonathan Eig
Options for the Washington Football Team to replace Landon Collins at safety.
Landon Collins has been a lightning rod for the Washington Football Team’s often-disappointing defense in 2020. His aggressive play has led to a lot of missed coverages and missed tackles. He has made several big plays – none bigger than his strip-sack of Andy Dalton early in the Week 7 WFT-Dallas game. But those big plays have been few and far between.
As we all know by now, that Dallas game would be Collins’ final one for the 2020 season. He has been sidelined by a torn Achilles and will most likely not be healthy until sometime in late 2021.
Replacing him will be one of the team’s main tasks during the bye week break. Though many fans were calling for his benching before the injury, this still poses a challenge. One of the things that exacerbated Collins’ poor play was the fact that his fellow safety Troy Apke was arguably worse.
Whereas Collins’ role was to be an aggressive close-to-the-line player, Apke was often tasked with patrolling the deeper parts of the field. His inability to keep plays in front of him made Collins’ failures look even worse. When Jack Del Rio began giving more playing time to steadier tacklers Deshazor Everett and Kamren Curl, Collins’ play also picked up a bit.
We will be left wondering if he would have continued to improve with new running mates in the second half of the season.
The good news is that WFT has multiple options in replacing Collins. Truth be told, safeties are probably the easiest defensive players to find. That may seem like a ludicrous statement given WFT’s struggles to identify any long-term answers in the wake of Sean Taylor’s death, but we’re not talking about long-term answers right now.
If you recall, journeymen safeties like Brandon Merriweather and D. J. Swearinger were rather good in shorts stints for WFT over the past decade. If you need a quick fix, there are players like that available. Here are several options, both in and out of house.