When you look at the NFL’s best defenses in 2020 — the ones that are able to stay consistently efficient-to-dominant in a league that sets up success in the passing game above all — there are mandatory characteristics that transcend coordinator and scheme. Especially in an era in which sub-packages and hybrid defenders are the norm as opposed to the outlier, modern defenses must have these three things:

1. Front multiplicity and gap confusion. Great defenses rarely show the same fronts twice in a row from play to play. You may see a base front on one play, and then, some sort of wicked NASCAR or amoeba front on the next. Then, variants of those concepts as drives continue. Those different looks challenge offensive protection calls, especially when offenses are running packages with three or more receivers on 65% of their plays. Then, when you create gap confusion with different line stunts and multi-level blitzes, you wind up with some very uncomfortable quarterbacks and fractured passing games. How many defensive linemen have their hands down, and how many are standing up? Where are they attacking based on where they start?
2. Muddied looks at the linebacker level. When your defense has one or more moneybacks or monsterbacks — players who can affect offenses everywhere from the line of scrimmage to the deep third — you have an extreme tactical advantage you can use in all kinds of different ways. Move beyond the traditional stay-at-home linebacker, as modern defenses have, and you are able to present clear pre-snap looks to a quarterback and his receivers, and then go about doing radically different things after the snap. Throw linebacker pressure from the A-gaps and then drop into coverage from there, and even Russell Wilson will lose his place.
3. Coverage switches in the secondary. It is the job of every modern defensive coordinator and secondary coach to plant schematic and spacing inabilities in the mind of the opposing quarterback. This is done in the secondary through the refusal to run coverage based on what is shown pre-snap. What might look like a Cover-0 jailbreak blitz pre-snap turns into 2-Man. What might look like a man defense indicator based on reaction to offensive motion becomes zone. That single-high safety look you see before you take the ball from the center is actually Cover-2 or Quarters, and as the quarterback, you now have to re-focus — especially if you’re running heavy play-action, you turn your back to the defense at your second step, and you turn back around at your fourth or fifth step to see something entirely different than what you expected.

You’ll see different iterations of these concepts among the NFL’s best defensive play-callers in 2020, but you won’t see the absence of any of them. Here, with all that said, are the league’s best defensive minds this season, and the staple ideas that make those defenses great.