Washington Football Team: A wish list of free agent safeties

In our latest installment of the “free agent wish list” series, here’s a look at some safeties whom the Washington Football Team could pursue.

Do the terms free and strong safety have meaning anymore? In the olden days, when I was growing up watching the Washington Football Team, most offenses ran a classic two-back, two-wideout, one-tight end alignment.

Defenses responded by having a strong safety, who lined up on the tight end side of the field. He would play close to the line and be responsible for covering the tight end (few tight ends had the speed to run by you in those days). On running plays, he would essentially serve as a fourth linebacker.

Meanwhile, the free safety, as the name suggests, would patrol the deep middle. He had one primary job: Make sure nobody got past him. Of course, there’s an element of semantics in all this, but as the Washington Football Team considers its free agent strategy, I’m finding it useful to consider how the safety position has evolved since those days.

Perhaps it did not begin with Joe Gibbs and his two-tight ends sets, but Gibbs’ success with a single back certainly changed things. With two tight ends on the field, the old distinctions between strong and free safety seemed less important. And then, as rules were continually tweaked to encourage more passing, five receiver packages became a thing. Or four receivers and a back, who for all intents and purposes, was really a fifth receiver. As defense responded, the role of the safety had to change.

Seattle’s Legion of Boom may have been the last of the classic secondary lineups, with Kam Chancellor – a linebacker who was called a strong safety – and Earl Thomas – one of the best free safeties of the last quarter century – manning the two positions. But even Chancellor and Thomas showed the evolution. For all his immense safety size, Chancellor could still drop into deep coverage. And Thomas, despite standing just 5’10”, would constantly stick his nose into the middle of the scrum.

These days, I think it is wiser to refer to in-the-box safeties and deep safeties in place of strong and free, but again, that is largely semantics. Whatever you call the position, the Washington Football Team needs some help. And there is help available in the free agent market, though I don’t think it makes a lot of sense for Washington to splurge.