Kansas City Chiefs RT Mitchell Schwartz has been through the grinder early on in the 2020 NFL season. He’s faced off with heavyweights like J.J. Watt, Whitney Mercilus, Joey Bosa and Melvin Ingram to name a few. It hasn’t all been sunshine and roses either, in Week 1 he surrendered his first sack in what felt like a millennium.
As Schwartz gets prepared for Week 3, he’ll face an entirely new challenge. The Baltimore Ravens revamped their defensive front from a season ago, adding players like Derek Wolfe and Calais Campbell to the mix. The number of players they have who can get after the quarterback is a daunting task, even for a veteran like Schwartz.
“They’ve got a lot of guys,” Schwartz told reporters on Thursday. “(Matthew) Judon has been there for a while, he’s an awesome player. To bring in Calais (Campbell), to bring in Derek Wolfe, they’ve got some younger guys, (Tyus) Bowser has been playing really well, they still have (Pernell) McPhee there who seems like he’s been there forever, and he’s still playing awesome football.”
Schwartz isn’t just expecting to see just one player line up across from him the entire game. He’s preparing to face a variety of players and he’s preparing for a team that has dialed up blitzes nearly 42% of the time through the first two weeks of the season. He’ll be blocking up a lot of different players coming from a variety of alignments.
“You’ve got a lot of guys, they tend to like to blitz a lot too, go one on one a lot so they can roll those guys through,” Schwartz explained. “Everyone’s a little bit different and they’re all good players. They do a really good job of it. Who you’re going against isn’t as cookie-cutter as some weeks where, ‘Oh, I’m going to see this guy 85% of the snaps.’ You’re going to get a rotation of them. They’re able to roll through. The front seven seems like its 12 or 13 deep, and it’s pretty much all awesome players.”
Whoever lines up across from Schwartz in Week 3, expect him to elevate his game under the bright lights of “Monday Night Football.”
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