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The Detroit Lions made a potentially significant splash in the free agent pool on Monday. The team signed cornerback Quinton Dunbar to a deal after a visit to Allen Park to meet with the team.
The courtship worked, and now the Lions have themselves a veteran starter who instantly–potentially–upgrades one of the weakest positions on the roster.
I used the word “potentially” twice above, and that’s part of the rub with what the Lions are getting in Dunbar.
The 28-year-old Dunbar has six seasons of NFL experience. The first five were in Washington, where he progressed his way up from being an undrafted free agent cut in August into a starting cornerback and one of the best players on the team. It was an impressive climb for a player converting from being a wide receiver at Florida to playing defense.
For a guy who didn’t play defense in college, Dunbar’s tackling is impressive. He’s physical, aggressive and strong, with surprisingly sound technique and fundamentals for a defensive naif. He’s patient and takes consistently smart angles in attacking screens and coming off his man to make tackles in the open field.
The ball skills are what you’d expect for a converted wideout. Dunbar can go get the ball. He has 10 career INTs and 40 passes defended in 64 career games, starting 31. Dunbar uses his length and excellent timing of a closing burst to make plays on the ball that many corners can’t. He will rely on it too much at times and get beat by pinpoint throws, but Dunbar is not alone in that.
At 6-2 and over 200 pounds, he’s built to handle bigger receivers. He will use his size to fight through receivers and punish those that aren’t aggressive at extending to catch the throw. Witness this great thievery from his outstanding 2019 campaign, baiting the QB into a throw and surprising the wideout at how fast and physically he got there at the point of attack:
Watch Dunbar anticipate the slant here. See how he takes a couple steps inside expecting the break. Gives him the advantage as he jumps the route and gets the INT #Redskins pic.twitter.com/IcsTCF74aC
— Mark Bullock (@MarkBullockNFL) October 13, 2019
That is Dunbar at his best in his best season. His 2019 campaign was outstanding, earning the second-best overall grade of any CB in the NFL from Pro Football Focus. Seattle pounced on his frosty relationship with Washington and made him a Seahawk for the low price of a fifth-round draft pick.
It did not go well for Dunbar in Seattle. The ascension up the NFL mountain started rolling back down. Much of the issue was injury-related. Dunbar’s great 2019 ended after just 11 games due to a leg injury, and then an offseason peccadillo (he was charged, and subsequently cleared, of being involved in an armed robbery) kept him from being in great shape. Dunbar tweaked a knee in Week 2 and struggled in trying to play through it.
The Seahawks pulled the plug after six games. He briefly resumed practicing late in the year but was never activated off I.R. before having surgery in December.
It was the third straight season Dunbar played less than 12 games and finished on the injured list. All the injuries have been to his legs and all are separate: a nerve issue with his lower leg in 2018, a hamstring in 2019 and the knee in 2020. That’s a troublesome trend, and he’s not played well through injuries.
As long as he’s healthy, Dunbar should start for the Lions. He’s a higher-end talent, better playmaker and more experienced zone and off-man corner than Amani Oruwariye, one of the two projected starters on the outside.
The Lions sorely needed a veteran on the back end of the defense, and Dunbar can be that guy. He can play outside in nickel but also slide inside against bigger slots, something that was a good niche for him in his early career in Washington. One of Dunbar’s coaches with the Football Team is new Lions defensive backs coach Aubrey Pleasant, which should help any transition or worries about Dunbar’s decline.
There is certainly some risk and trepidation with the injury history and only having one exemplary season out of six in the NFL, no question. But this is the kind of low-risk veteran signing that could be a big boon for Detroit, a team with limited talent on the roster searching for a more physical and aggressive identity on defense.