Washington Football Team: Positives and negatives from Week 5
2. Defensive scheme
Shockingly enough, I wouldn’t blame the scheme too much, but criticism is necessary at this point. The vanilla scheme that Washington has run has officially come to a boiling point, takeaway two from Sunday is that Washington may not be playing their personnel to their strengths.
For example, playing Landon Collins and expecting him to provide adequate coverage ability whether it be as a deep half safety or a centerfield safety, is approaching the definition of insanity. Not only that, playing Jamin Davis, who I’ve written about extensively here and on Twitter, 13 plays, is ridiculous.
Finishing here, your personnel is suited to play man coverage. I’m sure that’s an unpopular opinion, but William Jackson III, Benjamin St-Juste, and Kendall Fuller have all shown that they can strive in press-man. Bobby McCain, while I have my doubts as a deep half safety, he actually performs better as your centerfield safety.
William Jackson III was always gonna face a learning curve getting used to playing in Washington. And that learning curve is still there after four games with the team, he explained on Thursday https://t.co/QUNmCTCLEK
— Pete Hailey (@PeteHaileyNBCS) October 8, 2021
That would mean Landon Collins, Kam Curl, and others can strive in the box or as close to the line of scrimmage as possible, in Curl’s case, even as a slot defender. Running a heavy single high safety where you can run either cover-1 or cover-3 looks would work wonders for this team. For some reason, they are not doing it and it’s routinely bit them in the behind week in and week out over the last five weeks. Change must happen.