Preston Smith had a disappointing and mostly unproductive 2020 season. There’s no doubt about it, and both Smith and the Green Bay Packers admitted as much when the two sides negotiated an incentive-laden pay cut for the 2021 season. Restructuring Smith’s deal to the level it was re-worked probably wouldn’t have been an option had he produced at 2019 levels. He didn’t, so both the player and team were open to a big change to his deal in 2021.
Among the 59 edge rushers with at least 278 pass-rushing snaps last season, Smith ranked 54th in pass-rushing productivity at Pro Football Focus.
The Packers are banking on Smith’s bouncing back this season.
In many ways, Smith’s 2020 season was something of an anomaly. He had only 26 total pressures, but in the five years prior, he averaged 43.4 per year. He produced one pressure every 15 pass-rushes, but in the five years prior, he averaged one every nine pass-rushes. His pass-rushing grade at Pro Football Focus was 54.1, but his pass-rushing grade was at least 66.8 in four of his first five years.
Smith’s overall grade at PFF ended up at 53.1 in 2020. During his first five seasons, Smith’s overall grade never finished below 63.7.
The Packers have good reason to believe Smith will be more disruptive and a more effective player in 2021. Teams must always be projecting what they’ll get out of players, and Smith’s 2020 season can be easily viewed as a harbinger of things to come, but past performance is at least part of the projection process, and the first five years of Smith’s career were actually remarkably consistent.
If Smith returns to anything resembling his first five NFL seasons, the Packers will have an effective and productive edge rusher at a reasonable cost against the cap in 2021.
There is, of course, the chance Smith continues to decline, which would both hurt the defense and take away snaps from ascending edge rusher Rashan Gary. While the cap savings of releasing Smith were the primary reason for his potential as a cap casualty, the opportunity to play Gary more snaps opposite Za’Darius Smith was also an attractive consequence of moving on. Now, Smith has a monetary incentive to produce sacks, and the veteran will want to be on the field to create those numbers. Gary should play more, but him becoming a full-time player in 2021 is now far from guaranteed.
It’s never easy to project the trajectory of a veteran’s career after a down season. Some players bounce back, re-asserting themselves as something close to what they were before the down season. Others continue trending in the wrong direction. Smith go could either way, and neither would be surprising.
The Packers are banking on Smith bouncing back. They were confident in spending big to get him in free agency after he produced only four sacks during his final year in Washington in 2018. Now, they are hoping he can re-establish himself as the player he was from 2015-19 after an uncharacteristic season in 2020.
The Packers could have paid $8 million in dead cap while Smith attempted to bounce back with another team in 2021. Now, with a restructured deal, they’ll get almost as much savings on the cap while Smith plays out the season in Green Bay. It appears to be a flip of the coin that favors the Packers.
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