Jaylon Smith challenged us to “watch the film.” Here’s what we learned
By Bob Sturm Jan 19, 2021
60
The Cowboys’ 2020 season was long and disappointing. It ended at Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on a tiny margin that seemed a proper cap to a season that couldn’t end soon enough.
After the game, as has been the case all season, key players met the media through the lens of a camera for what now passes as a postgame press briefing.
Jaylon Smith was wearing a yellow winter coat and what we can assume were sunglasses that were created by him for his name-brand line. The questions began. For four minutes, they were all about this game. The final question was about the future:
“Jaylon, there has been a lot of discussion about the future of players whether they are under contract or not. Do you feel like you will be back here next year at all?”
“Me?” he responded, with what appeared to be some level of confusion.
(Long pause)
“Yeah,” from the reporter.
“Pffffff. I mean, watch the film. But, for me, it’s a blessing to be able to play this game. So many people thought I’d never play. Ever again. So, for me, I’m my worst critic and I’m my biggest fan. I’m gonna keep battling and keep grinding. But the guys that know football and know our scheme and watch film, I don’t have to speak on myself. It’s all love. It’s all love.”
Let’s start at the beginning and with some disclosure. I have long been a huge Jaylon Smith enthusiast. (I resist the word “fan” because it generally means one is not capable of seeing reality sometimes, and I believe you can want great things for another human while still seeing things for what they appear to be, not what you want them to be). I enjoy his story, and his recovery is inspirational. I have even done a public event a few years back where it was just Jaylon and myself in front of a large audience having a conversation. In other words, if anything, I am probably a bit biased on his behalf.
You may recall that after the 2018 season, I wrote a very long story enthusiastically praising what I deemed to be the Cowboys Player of the Year. It was Jaylon Smith. Here is a passage from that piece. I bolded one line in particular.
“The player who was so limited in 2017 shed all of those labels in a hurry. His 2018 was nothing short of magnificent and buried any and all claims that he could not return to being the player projected as a top-10 draft pick before that 2016 Fiesta Bowl.
In other words, the recovery is now in the past tense. Jaylon Smith is a star in this league.
I am not saying he played a perfect season. We will see some plays below that were not all excellent; this is a very tough league with some nearly-impossible matchups. But, I want to recognize Smith’s season, the risk the Cowboys took, and the position they are now in because the player and the franchise believed in a return to form.
Jaylon Smith wasn’t just a good player this year. He was one of the very best linebackers in all of football. Given that people like me had our doubts in August about whether he would ever be a league-average starter, the strides he made cannot be overstated.
My evaluation of Jaylon’s 2018 comes down to more than just his splash plays. But, he made many, many splash plays. He had sacks, forced fumbles, passes defended, and tackles for loss. He made plays that helped win games and one or two we will not soon forget.
Not only did Smith make more big plays, but he made far fewer poor plays. This is the true key of a special NFL player. When you are not making difference-making positive plays, it’s important to avoid the difference-making negatives.”
That was 23 months ago.
And here we are today, challenged by No. 54 himself to “watch the film” of the 2020 season to evaluate whether there should be a conversation about the future of his inclusion on this team. It wasn’t a very good season; too often, it felt like he was responsible for some massive plays and what we called difference-making negatives. So, partly because I enjoy uncovering more than easy narratives, I took on Jaylon’s challenge to “watch the film.”
But not just me — because, despite my extreme interest, I have certainly coached the game of football for zero days in my entire life and have limitations to my scheme knowledge because of this. Assisting me today is a team of experts: coaches and scouts I know or have come to know through this job that I wanted to assist in the evaluation of these plays.
This project is not to make Jaylon look good or bad. It is to understand how a player this good could fall this far and whether the larger changes in the defense — first from 2019’s Marinelli-Richard crew to Nolan and then this year’s move from Nolan to Dan Quinn, which will look like a complete 180 — can undo the bad and help him try to regain the good.
First, I want to bring in a guy whose opinion I really enjoy: Steve Palazzolo from Pro Football Focus. I asked him to evaluate Jaylon’s current status and season performance. He responded that same day:
Bob, some thoughts on Jaylon Smith:
Linebacker grading does tend to fluctuate more than other positions in the PFF system, and I think it’s largely the nature of the position. So much of defensive performance is based upon who you face and, especially at linebacker, opposing matchups. So using multiple years of performance is better than one year as the sample size obviously helps sift through the noise. Also, linebacker play was down a bit across the league, so Smith’s 2020 didn’t look THAT bad comparatively.
This is Smith’s four-year career. Pretty good:
I buzzed through some of Smith’s 2020 film, and I think the biggest difference this year was in the run game, just as the grades show. He still has the speed and agility to beat blockers to the spot and, as I described during the draft process, he looks like a Madden glitch morphing to the ball at times. However, this year, Smith’s negatively graded plays against the run increased dramatically, and it looked like his block awareness was poor. He seemed to have his eyes on the back, and he rarely saw second-level blocks coming his way. Perhaps it was the new scheme, but in past years we’d seen Smith use his hands and shed blocks much better whereas this year he just got popped or moved far too easily. Hope this helps, but the bottom line is linebacker play does fluctuate a bit and think we did see that with Smith this year.
I really appreciate Steve providing PFF’s grading. As you can see, his four-year portrait is in the top half of the league in almost everything and in top quarter of the league in three of those six categories. I tend to agree that most of Jaylon’s biggest issues this year were on the ground in run situations. I also concede that almost all of these situations are not a solo problem: The Cowboys’ defensive tackle and safety positions let him down, as did the long-term health situations of Leighton Vander Esch and Sean Lee, to say nothing of the scheme issues.
Now to our panel of experts. I am not going to name them because I don’t want to lose the focus of the piece and have people questioning them and their track records. The focus should be on evaluating what their eyes see as coaches. I promise, nobody here has an issue with Jaylon, and several are watching these plays on film for the first time. But they do know the game of football inside and out. They are:
Coach 1: 16 years of defensive football and head coach at the high-school level.
Coach 2: 10 years in defensive football — both college and high school levels.
Coach 3: Linebackers coach at the D1 level.
Coach 4: Over 25 years in coaching, including 20 as offensive coordinator at the high school level.
Each of them stressed the issues with not fully knowing the calls but simply looking at what the tape shows. In fact, Coach 2 even qualified it this way: “All comments are qualified by not knowing the defensive play call, which is obviously a huge part of the discussion. But I will confine myself to technique-only (as much as possible) as you requested.” The coaches are all working independently; they do not know each other, nor do they know what the others’ evaluations are.
I gave them seven plays that quickly jumped out as significant moments where Jaylon Smith looked to be at least partly at fault. Each one has five frames for you to look at while we are talking about each spot. On Thursday, I will dive into an overall collection of our evaluation as well as my conclusions. But our panel is up first — and I walked away intrigued by how often the coaches found blame elsewhere.
Play 1 – Seattle – Q2 – 7:25 – 1st-and-goal – Chris Carson left for no gain.
This play caught eyes because, quite frankly, it was the first of many in which Jaylon clearly became confused mid-play, stopped his action completely and turned the other way. It was like someone’s Xbox controller got unplugged because the rest of the defense continued in their uninterrupted direction. What caused him to make a movement that seemingly made no sense? His eyes and his body were in such direct conflict during this two-second play that it even jumped out to people on their couches. The question of “what is Jaylon doing?” certainly popped up a few times this season.
Carson did not get in the end zone. but I still wanted this one to begin our evaluation — and don’t forget there is always money in the banana stand.
Coach 1: Once 54-Smith has hunted his gap, he is committed, continue on, flow to ball, get in the picture; the pause to check the boot (which is long-gone if 3-Wilson has the ball), shows an incomplete understanding of how to be reasonably effective in the defense. “If I do my job, I cannot do that job.” The real problem here is of course 98-Crawford, who gets inexplicably hooked after two steps; poor read of departure angle of covered OL, poor technique vs. full zone to allow his gap to run away from him; 25 too light, too high, not enough pressure on the LOS with his chest, his only hope is to undercut the crack and run through the underside of the block; 39 not quick enough on the crack-replace, especially with full zone flow at him, outside technique (even in man coverage) allows for this read to be made quickly.
Coach 2: Against the outside zone, Jaylon should not jump into that A Gap. It puts him way behind the play. But the crack on Woods cuts off his lateral flow. Jaylon has no good option here. As for turning back to Russ? That is on Jaylon. Do your job and run to the ball. The biggest takeaway here is the lack of trust Jaylon and LVE showed in the structure around them all year. I put 90 percent of this on Brandon Carr (No. 39). He gets a crack block by his key (No. 14). The play is strung out to him, and he can’t make an outside-in tackle. Carr should not hesitate, force the run back inside. He has support coming, and Armstrong is playing this perfectly. Armstrong deserves a mention here. They have a chance because of him, and this shows why he got more reps as the season went along.
Coach 3: Great read, great downhill move, no false steps… BUT HE STOPS AND LOOKS AT… WHAT EXACTLY??? He may not end up making the play, but in the middle of sprinting towards the ball carrier, he stops and sees a ghost. This was the weirdest play of the game. He is not trusting his eyes. Maybe he doesn’t trust his teammates, and he is trying to do too much, but this was just bizarre.
Coach 4: Problem stems from how they are set on the bunch side —makes them out-gapped to both sides —just dumb, got two in same gap to the bunch, that leaves them screwed out the back end. Smith has backside A gap, full flow and should scrape. Safety doesn’t allow it, and Smith is clueless anyhow and put in a bad situation gap-wise to begin with.
Play 2 – Cleveland – Q2 – 9:11 – 1st-and-10 – D’Ernest Johnson left end to DAL 23 for 28 yards
This one is very frustrating, as part of the first half against Cleveland that might have been the defense’s darkest hour this season. It was as if they had never been together or coached. And, yes, we have learned over time that when this team gets gashed on the ground, it does seem to happen more when Sean Lee and Leighton Vander Esch are absent. For instance, Weeks 4 and 5 in 2017, when Jaylon and a backup LB (Anthony Hitchens) were just abused by the Rams and Packers in consecutive home games.
But this seemed different due to the pre-snap motion of the TE and then the pulling RG as well, all to the point of attack. Was this on Jaylon or were they just outnumbered — and was the blitzing CB coming from the far left of the frames way too wide to affect anything?
By Bob Sturm Jan 19, 2021
The Cowboys’ 2020 season was long and disappointing. It ended at Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on a tiny margin that seemed a proper cap to a season that couldn’t end soon enough.
After the game, as has been the case all season, key players met the media through the lens of a camera for what now passes as a postgame press briefing.
Jaylon Smith was wearing a yellow winter coat and what we can assume were sunglasses that were created by him for his name-brand line. The questions began. For four minutes, they were all about this game. The final question was about the future:
“Jaylon, there has been a lot of discussion about the future of players whether they are under contract or not. Do you feel like you will be back here next year at all?”
“Me?” he responded, with what appeared to be some level of confusion.
(Long pause)
“Yeah,” from the reporter.
“Pffffff. I mean, watch the film. But, for me, it’s a blessing to be able to play this game. So many people thought I’d never play. Ever again. So, for me, I’m my worst critic and I’m my biggest fan. I’m gonna keep battling and keep grinding. But the guys that know football and know our scheme and watch film, I don’t have to speak on myself. It’s all love. It’s all love.”
Let’s start at the beginning and with some disclosure. I have long been a huge Jaylon Smith enthusiast. (I resist the word “fan” because it generally means one is not capable of seeing reality sometimes, and I believe you can want great things for another human while still seeing things for what they appear to be, not what you want them to be). I enjoy his story, and his recovery is inspirational. I have even done a public event a few years back where it was just Jaylon and myself in front of a large audience having a conversation. In other words, if anything, I am probably a bit biased on his behalf.
You may recall that after the 2018 season, I wrote a very long story enthusiastically praising what I deemed to be the Cowboys Player of the Year. It was Jaylon Smith. Here is a passage from that piece. I bolded one line in particular.
“The player who was so limited in 2017 shed all of those labels in a hurry. His 2018 was nothing short of magnificent and buried any and all claims that he could not return to being the player projected as a top-10 draft pick before that 2016 Fiesta Bowl.
In other words, the recovery is now in the past tense. Jaylon Smith is a star in this league.
I am not saying he played a perfect season. We will see some plays below that were not all excellent; this is a very tough league with some nearly-impossible matchups. But, I want to recognize Smith’s season, the risk the Cowboys took, and the position they are now in because the player and the franchise believed in a return to form.
Jaylon Smith wasn’t just a good player this year. He was one of the very best linebackers in all of football. Given that people like me had our doubts in August about whether he would ever be a league-average starter, the strides he made cannot be overstated.
My evaluation of Jaylon’s 2018 comes down to more than just his splash plays. But, he made many, many splash plays. He had sacks, forced fumbles, passes defended, and tackles for loss. He made plays that helped win games and one or two we will not soon forget.
Not only did Smith make more big plays, but he made far fewer poor plays. This is the true key of a special NFL player. When you are not making difference-making positive plays, it’s important to avoid the difference-making negatives.”
That was 23 months ago.
And here we are today, challenged by No. 54 himself to “watch the film” of the 2020 season to evaluate whether there should be a conversation about the future of his inclusion on this team. It wasn’t a very good season; too often, it felt like he was responsible for some massive plays and what we called difference-making negatives. So, partly because I enjoy uncovering more than easy narratives, I took on Jaylon’s challenge to “watch the film.”
But not just me — because, despite my extreme interest, I have certainly coached the game of football for zero days in my entire life and have limitations to my scheme knowledge because of this. Assisting me today is a team of experts: coaches and scouts I know or have come to know through this job that I wanted to assist in the evaluation of these plays.
This project is not to make Jaylon look good or bad. It is to understand how a player this good could fall this far and whether the larger changes in the defense — first from 2019’s Marinelli-Richard crew to Nolan and then this year’s move from Nolan to Dan Quinn, which will look like a complete 180 — can undo the bad and help him try to regain the good.
First, I want to bring in a guy whose opinion I really enjoy: Steve Palazzolo from Pro Football Focus. I asked him to evaluate Jaylon’s current status and season performance. He responded that same day:
Bob, some thoughts on Jaylon Smith:
Linebacker grading does tend to fluctuate more than other positions in the PFF system, and I think it’s largely the nature of the position. So much of defensive performance is based upon who you face and, especially at linebacker, opposing matchups. So using multiple years of performance is better than one year as the sample size obviously helps sift through the noise. Also, linebacker play was down a bit across the league, so Smith’s 2020 didn’t look THAT bad comparatively.
This is Smith’s four-year career. Pretty good:
I buzzed through some of Smith’s 2020 film, and I think the biggest difference this year was in the run game, just as the grades show. He still has the speed and agility to beat blockers to the spot and, as I described during the draft process, he looks like a Madden glitch morphing to the ball at times. However, this year, Smith’s negatively graded plays against the run increased dramatically, and it looked like his block awareness was poor. He seemed to have his eyes on the back, and he rarely saw second-level blocks coming his way. Perhaps it was the new scheme, but in past years we’d seen Smith use his hands and shed blocks much better whereas this year he just got popped or moved far too easily. Hope this helps, but the bottom line is linebacker play does fluctuate a bit and think we did see that with Smith this year.
I really appreciate Steve providing PFF’s grading. As you can see, his four-year portrait is in the top half of the league in almost everything and in top quarter of the league in three of those six categories. I tend to agree that most of Jaylon’s biggest issues this year were on the ground in run situations. I also concede that almost all of these situations are not a solo problem: The Cowboys’ defensive tackle and safety positions let him down, as did the long-term health situations of Leighton Vander Esch and Sean Lee, to say nothing of the scheme issues.
Now to our panel of experts. I am not going to name them because I don’t want to lose the focus of the piece and have people questioning them and their track records. The focus should be on evaluating what their eyes see as coaches. I promise, nobody here has an issue with Jaylon, and several are watching these plays on film for the first time. But they do know the game of football inside and out. They are:
Coach 1: 16 years of defensive football and head coach at the high-school level.
Coach 2: 10 years in defensive football — both college and high school levels.
Coach 3: Linebackers coach at the D1 level.
Coach 4: Over 25 years in coaching, including 20 as offensive coordinator at the high school level.
Each of them stressed the issues with not fully knowing the calls but simply looking at what the tape shows. In fact, Coach 2 even qualified it this way: “All comments are qualified by not knowing the defensive play call, which is obviously a huge part of the discussion. But I will confine myself to technique-only (as much as possible) as you requested.” The coaches are all working independently; they do not know each other, nor do they know what the others’ evaluations are.
I gave them seven plays that quickly jumped out as significant moments where Jaylon Smith looked to be at least partly at fault. Each one has five frames for you to look at while we are talking about each spot. On Thursday, I will dive into an overall collection of our evaluation as well as my conclusions. But our panel is up first — and I walked away intrigued by how often the coaches found blame elsewhere.
Play 1 – Seattle – Q2 – 7:25 – 1st-and-goal – Chris Carson left for no gain.
This play caught eyes because, quite frankly, it was the first of many in which Jaylon clearly became confused mid-play, stopped his action completely and turned the other way. It was like someone’s Xbox controller got unplugged because the rest of the defense continued in their uninterrupted direction. What caused him to make a movement that seemingly made no sense? His eyes and his body were in such direct conflict during this two-second play that it even jumped out to people on their couches. The question of “what is Jaylon doing?” certainly popped up a few times this season.
Carson did not get in the end zone. but I still wanted this one to begin our evaluation — and don’t forget there is always money in the banana stand.
Coach 1: Once 54-Smith has hunted his gap, he is committed, continue on, flow to ball, get in the picture; the pause to check the boot (which is long-gone if 3-Wilson has the ball), shows an incomplete understanding of how to be reasonably effective in the defense. “If I do my job, I cannot do that job.” The real problem here is of course 98-Crawford, who gets inexplicably hooked after two steps; poor read of departure angle of covered OL, poor technique vs. full zone to allow his gap to run away from him; 25 too light, too high, not enough pressure on the LOS with his chest, his only hope is to undercut the crack and run through the underside of the block; 39 not quick enough on the crack-replace, especially with full zone flow at him, outside technique (even in man coverage) allows for this read to be made quickly.
Coach 2: Against the outside zone, Jaylon should not jump into that A Gap. It puts him way behind the play. But the crack on Woods cuts off his lateral flow. Jaylon has no good option here. As for turning back to Russ? That is on Jaylon. Do your job and run to the ball. The biggest takeaway here is the lack of trust Jaylon and LVE showed in the structure around them all year. I put 90 percent of this on Brandon Carr (No. 39). He gets a crack block by his key (No. 14). The play is strung out to him, and he can’t make an outside-in tackle. Carr should not hesitate, force the run back inside. He has support coming, and Armstrong is playing this perfectly. Armstrong deserves a mention here. They have a chance because of him, and this shows why he got more reps as the season went along.
Coach 3: Great read, great downhill move, no false steps… BUT HE STOPS AND LOOKS AT… WHAT EXACTLY??? He may not end up making the play, but in the middle of sprinting towards the ball carrier, he stops and sees a ghost. This was the weirdest play of the game. He is not trusting his eyes. Maybe he doesn’t trust his teammates, and he is trying to do too much, but this was just bizarre.
Coach 4: Problem stems from how they are set on the bunch side —makes them out-gapped to both sides —just dumb, got two in same gap to the bunch, that leaves them screwed out the back end. Smith has backside A gap, full flow and should scrape. Safety doesn’t allow it, and Smith is clueless anyhow and put in a bad situation gap-wise to begin with.
Play 2 – Cleveland – Q2 – 9:11 – 1st-and-10 – D’Ernest Johnson left end to DAL 23 for 28 yards
This one is very frustrating, as part of the first half against Cleveland that might have been the defense’s darkest hour this season. It was as if they had never been together or coached. And, yes, we have learned over time that when this team gets gashed on the ground, it does seem to happen more when Sean Lee and Leighton Vander Esch are absent. For instance, Weeks 4 and 5 in 2017, when Jaylon and a backup LB (Anthony Hitchens) were just abused by the Rams and Packers in consecutive home games.
But this seemed different due to the pre-snap motion of the TE and then the pulling RG as well, all to the point of attack. Was this on Jaylon or were they just outnumbered — and was the blitzing CB coming from the far left of the frames way too wide to affect anything?
