INDIANAPOLIS — In his 2019 season, per Pro Football Focus, Clemson linebacker Isaiah Simmons played 299 snaps in the box, 262 snaps at slot cornerback, 132 snaps at free safety, and 116 snaps at defensive line. The 6-foot-4, 225-pound Simmons also played 13 snaps at outside corner, to make his versatility even more impressive. That Simmons was able to do everything he did at an abnormally high level in Clemson’s 3-1-7 defense is why he’s a top-10 prospect in this draft class.
In his 2019 season, per PFF, Alabama safety Xavier McKinney played 285 snaps in the box, 271 snaps at free safety, and 227 snaps in the slot. The 6-foot-1, 200-pound McKinney also played 38 snaps on the defensive line and five snaps at outside corner, to make his versatility even more impressive. That McKinney was able to do everything he did at an abnormally high level in Alabama’s multiple defense is why he’s a top-20 prospect in this draft class.
You get the idea. LSU’s Grant Delpit, by most marks the only safety ranked higher than McKinney in this class, played 385 snaps at free safety, 316 snaps in the slot, and 149 snaps in the box last season.
In an NFL where five different linebackers spent over 100 coverage snaps in the slot last season (Carolina’s Shaq Thompson, Seattle’s K.J. Wright and Mychal Kendricks, Tampa Bay’s Lavonte David, and Denver’s Todd Davis), and seven different safeties (led by Carolina’s Eric Reid) had over 40 tackles against the run, the importance of the multi-position defensive player — or, one might say, the “positionless” defensive player — has never been more obvious. That will be reflected in the 2020 draft class, and beyond.
Redskins head coach Ron Rivera, who coached Shaq Thompson and Eric Reid in Carolina, now has to find the kinds of versatile defensive players he had before. Rivera mentioned linebacker Cole Holcolmb as one possibility, and was happy to talk about the decisive advantage that kind of range gives your defense in general.
“There are a couple guys who will tell you that I love position flex,” Rivera told me. “I believe in it. I think it’s huge. Shaq was a great example. Here was a guy who could play the nickel position for you, and run with receivers, and at the same time, go back in the box and play the SAM linebacker position. That’s an invaluable player. That’s the kind of player you look for in the draft. The guy who has that position flexibility.
“I think we have some guys who can do that at different positions. [Holcolmb] went out in space, and then came back in as a box player. Those are the kinds of guys you want, because you want that position flexibility. If you don’t have to rotate a guy off the field — if he can stay on the field — you can change your defense, and your defensive looks, and your defensive philosophies. You start rotating guys in, and you’re tipping your hat a little bit: ‘Hey, here’s our nickel package.'”
Raiders general manager Mike Mayock, who saw his defense finish 31st in Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted metrics in 2019, didn’t really have that guy last season, and the team paid for it — especially against today’s monster tight ends. First-round safety Johnathan Abram was supposed to help define that positionless position last season, but he missed all but one game in his rookie campaign with a torn rotator cuff. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the now-Las Vegas Raiders to gamble (sorry) on another such player in this draft.
“I think the league’s going that way too on both sides of the line of scrimmage,” Mayock said. “You start looking at guys on the offense that can play in the slot, play at running back, be H-backs, there’s not really a label for them. There’s just either dynamic players, or they’re not. And then you start looking at trying to match up with those guys on defense. When you start looking at any division, particularly ours, and the tight ends, for instance, that we have to play in our division, and you kind of go, ‘Who matches up?’ Do you want to play man coverage, and who matches up with those type of guys. They’re big guys who run fast. Who do we have? So more and more defenses around the league are saying, who are the guys you don’t necessarily have to put a label on, that are dynamic football players. Isaiah Simmons has played on the back end. He’s played at linebacker, he’s come off the edge. And really, I think the only limitations on him, are the ones a defensive coordinator puts on him.”
Matt Rhule, who replaced Rivera with the Panthers, comes from a three-year stint as Baylor’s head coach in which his offenses tested opposing defenses to put athletes all over the field. So, he’s as conscious as anyone in the NFL of the new paradigm.
“I would just call it the position-less player,” Rhule said on Tuesday. “The days of saying, ‘Hey, we need a MIKE linebacker or we need this.’ There’s certain traits you’re looking for, but you’re looking for position-less players. The offenses in the league are changing, so the defenses have to be able to do a lot of things. I think we’re just looking for traits. We’re looking for, ‘Hey, this guy can really do this or really do that.’ I think you’re seeing a lot more of that in the Combine as college football has really spread out. We’re going to try and stay ahead of the curve on that, make sure we keep bringing guys in who can do a lot of different things for us, that give us multiplicity within the roster.”
Rhule said that it’s to the point now where he wouldn’t necessarily take what a player did in college and fit him into those same positions at the NFL level. It’s all about physical and mental attributes. The Steelers proved this last season when they traded for Dolphins Swiss Army knife Minkah Fitzpatrick, put him at deep safety almost exclusively, and turned their defense around. The ideal is not to fit a player in to multiple roles because those roles are needed; it is to align the player’s skills to those positions, regardless of need. Multiplicity becomes its own strength. On the other hand, Mike Tomlin and his defensive staff didn’t care that Fitzpatrick played six different positions for Nick Saban; they saw that Fitzpatrick could do the one thing they needed him to do.
“I think it comes down to traits and how they fit and that’s why that whole process we had, ‘Hey, this our vision for what a three technique looks like in our defense,'” Rhule said of the balancing act between traits and positional requirements. “Doesn’t mean we have to find the best three technique in college, it means we have to go find the guy in college that has the traits we think we can coach. I think it’s really a fun process to find those traits and say, ‘What’s the vision for them within what we do?’”
Cardinals general manager Steve Keim, who’s had multi-position players on his mind and on his defense since Arizona selected Washington State safety Deone Bucannon in the first round of the 2014 draft and turned him into a versatile “Moneybacker,” sees the game the same way today — through the eyes of players like Isaiah Simmons.
“I think with any player, you have to have a plan for him,” Keim said. “Which is, where are you going to play him, how is he going to align for you, and with players like that, his flexibility is his strength, his ability to match up in coverage and do the different things he can do. He’s a dynamic athlete, you know he can play in the slot, he has some cover ability of wide receivers. I saw him play twice live this year, he’s not only a long athlete, but he’s got those short area movement skills that a lot of longer players don’t have which again can translate to a very good cover guy at our level.”
Which is to say, Isaiah Simmons isn’t a linebacker or a safety or a cornerback; he’s an athlete. Xavier McKinney and Grant Delpit aren’t safeties per se as much as they are athletes who can be poured into the (hopefully) intelligent designs of their coaching staffs after their general managers pinpoint the traits that best match what the defensive is trying to do schematically. This is the way of the new NFL, which means it’s going to be the way of the draft, and the college pipeline that feeds it.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”