Tag: Yannick Ngakoue trade

Jags tied for second-most picks in 2021 NFL draft

Jacksonville picks 10 times in the upcoming draft, including four picks in the first two rounds. That’s tied for second-most in the draft.

Though trading away players like Jalen Ramsey and Yannick Ngakoue was a hard pill to swallow at the time, those moves have given the Jacksonville Jaguars a lot of draft capital as the team attempts to rebuild. Jacksonville has 10 picks in the upcoming NFL draft, tied with five other teams for the second-most in the draft: the New York Jets, the Green Bay Packers, the Minnesota Vikings, the New England Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys.

The Jags originally had 11 selections in this draft, which would have tied Philadelphia for the most, but they traded one of their seventh-round picks to the Saints to acquire defensive tackle Malcom Brown.

The Jaguars pick four times in the first two rounds, and they pick twice in the fourth and fifth rounds, as well. They don’t currently have a fifth-round pick.

One of the team’s 10 picks is at first overall by virtue of its 1-15 season in 2020. Jacksonville will likely select quarterback Trevor Lawrence with that pick, and after trading away several players who led the team to an AFC Championship in 2017, it at least has the opportunity to build a new core around Lawrence in this draft.

Baltimore Ravens acquiring DE Yannick Ngakoue from Minnesota Vikings

The Baltimore Ravens are adding another piece to stacked defense.

The rich get richer and the weak get weaker. The Baltimore Ravens are in the process of acquiring DE Yannick Ngakoue from the Minnesota Vikings for draft picks, reports ESPN’s Adam Schefter.

Ngakoue will fly to Baltimore in the next 24 hours to go through COVID-19 testing so he can be ready to join his new team next week, after the Ravens come off a bye and start preparations for its Week 8 game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Ngakoue played for Jacksonville from 2016-19. He had all sorts of issues with the Jaguars’ front office and eventually forced a trade to Minnesota.

The Vikings are 1-5 and last in the NFC North. They are going nowhere, so they are sending Nakoue somewhere: to Baltimore.

The Ravens now have both DEs that played for Jacksonville in the 2017 AFC Championship as they already had Calais Campbell on their defensive front.

Ngakoue had five sacks as a Viking.

Yannick Ngakoue brings speed, effort to Vikings’ already formidable pass rush

With the trade to acquire pass-rusher Yannick Ngakoue, the Vikings are making it clear that they want a top-level pass rush above all.

Before the 2019 season, the Packers realized that they needed more of a pass rush than they had. General manager Brian Gutekunst and his staff went hard at the problem in free agency, signing Za’Darius Smith and Preston Smith to impressive deals. The Smith “brothers” provided appropriate value on the field, totaling 29.5 sacks and 167 total pressures between them, including the postseason. This was one fundamental reason the Packers were able to transcend their 6-9-1 record in 2018, and turn things around to the tune of a 13-3 mark and a trip to the NFC Championship game last season.

The Vikings, Green Bay’s primary challenger in the NFC North, had no such pass-rush issues to deal with in 2019 — Danielle Hunter has back-to-back 14.5-sack seasons and only Za’Darius Smith and San Francisco’s Nick Bosa had more total pressures in 2019 than Hunter’s 97. But after veteran bookend Everson Griffen voided the final three years of his deal and wound up signing with the Cowboys, that left a blank space in a front four that needs to ramp up its quarterback pressures on Hunter’s other side.

Enter former Jaguars pass-rusher Yannick Ngakoue, traded from his former team on Sunday morning in a move that seemed inevitable, given Ngakoue’s dissatisfaction with Jacksonville’s overall direction. Last season, Ngakoue was limited in his overall effectiveness with a hamstring injury, but he still put up eight sacks and 51 total pressures. The Vikings are obviously hoping for the version of Ngakoue that had 13 sacks, seven forced fumbles and 82 total pressures in 2017, but they’d probably settle for the guy who had 9.5 sacks and 64 total pressures in 2018.

Aligning himself with Hunter should provide a bump in production for Ngakoue — just as the dueling Smiths presented difficult math problems when it was time to figure out who to block against Green Bay’s defense, Hunter and Ngakoue will be nightmares for any offensive tackle trying to handle with with single-teams.

While Hunter blows opponents away with outstanding speed and improving technique, Ngakoue adds a devastating combination of quickness off the ball and some of the best snap-to-whistle effort pressures you’ll see.

This first came to my attention with this takedown of Andrew Luck in 2018.

Fast-forward to Week 15 of the 2019 season against the Raiders, and here’s Ngakoue doing a similar thing, pinballing his way through multiple blocks. If you don’t finish Ngakoue through the entire rep, he will be a constant thorn in your side.

And when it comes to quickness and acceleration? Against the Jets in Week 8, Ngakoue re-confirmed what has already been made apparent — you have no margin for error, or slowness off the snap, against this guy.

Can the combination of Ngakoue and Hunter do for the Vikings what the Smith signings did for the Packers? In an era when many teams are aligning with the idea that coverage is more important than pressure, Minnesota is making its pass rush as formidable as possible as the team tries to succeed with a completely revamped cornerback group. It’s an older-school approach that may work because the Vikings also have one of the two or three best linebackers in the game in Eric Kendricks, and the league’s best safety tandem in Harrison Smith and Anthony Harris.

If Yannick Ngakoue is able to bring to the Vikings what he brought to the Jaguars at his best, it would be foolish to count this defense out — and it will be a whole series of headaches for NFC North quarterbacks.

Vikings make blockbuster trade for ex-Jaguars DE Yannick Ngakoue

On Sunday morning, the Vikings took the last vestige of Jacksonville’s great 2017 defense by trading for edge-rusher Yannick Ngakoue.

In 2017, the Jacksonville Jaguars had the NFL’s best defense. How good was it? The 10-6 Jags got into the playoffs and were one half of football away from beating the Patriots in the AFC Championship game and going on to meet the Eagles in Super Bowl LII… with Blake Bortles as their quarterback. That defense was stacked with six Pro Bowlers — defensive linemen Malik Jackson and Calais Campbell, linebacker Telvin Smith, cornerbacks Jalen Ramsey and A.J. Bouye, and edge rusher Yannick Ngakoue.

As of Sunday morning, all six of those Pro Bowlers are gone. Ngakoue, who was the last man standing and had expressed his desire to be off the Jaguars roster for months, was traded on Sunday morning to the Vikings. ESPN’s Adam Schefter was the first with the details.

The Jaguars had placed the franchise tag on Ngakoue, and he’ll have to sign that to make the trade official. The franchise tag for Ngakoue comes in at $17.8 million, which is all guaranteed, and the Vikings currently have  had a little more than $12.5 million to work with, so they’ll have to make room sooner than later. As I wrote this week, offensive tackle Riley Reiff, who has a 2020 cap charge of $13.2 million and is only on the books for $4 million in dead money if released, is a prime candidate for exactly that.

During the last few months, Ngakoue has changed agents, beefed with Jaguars front office personnel on Twitter about his contractual situation, and made it as abundantly clear as possible that whatever positive relationship he had enjoyed with the franchise that selected him in the third round of the 2016 draft out of Maryland was in the past.

Ngakoue now has the different environment he desires, and his addition to the Vikings’ defense should make it quite formidable. Ngakoue had a relatively down year in 2019, but most teams would take eight sacks and 51 total pressures from their top edge-rusher, and Ngakoue isn’t even Minnesota’s top edge-rusher. That would be Danielle Hunter, who had 14.5 sacks and 102 total pressures in 2019 — only Green Bay’s Za’Darius Smith had more among edge defenders last season with 105. The Vikings also have the NFL’s best safety tandem with Harrison Smith and Anthony Harris, and one of the league’s best linebackers in Eric Kendricks. If the Vikings can get their shaky cornerback situation worked out with rookies Jeff Gladney and Cameron Dantzler, they should have a top-five defense.

As for the Jaguars, the mass exodus on defense has been as debilitating as it is perplexing. Last season, they ranked 29th in Defensive DVOA — quite a drop from that first overall spot just three full seasons ago. Though they have an estimable edge guy in 2019 rookie Josh Allen, there isn’t much else to go on, as the team has so far failed to replace with similar potential those Pro Bowl players they could not retain.

As for the Vikings, this is a Super Bowl-or-bust move. Not because of the draft capital, but because you don’t make this kind of trade without the intention to sign the player involved to a long-term contract. That signing will bring some cap relief in that there’s no way general manager Rick Spielman will agree to a contract that front-loads the money anywhere near Ngakoue’s franchise-tag cap charge. But paying Ngakoue long-term as one of the top 10 edge defenders in the league would likely create a contract with an annual value of around $17 million, and Hunter is already on the books with his own five-year, $72 million deal, signed in 2018. Hunter’s cap charge explodes from $9 million in 2020 to $17.75 million in 2021, which is a season NFL teams are estimating will have a reduced salary cap in line with reduces revenue as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

So, the Vikings now have a truly ferocious edge duo, right up there with the one their division rivals the Packers have in Za’Darius Smith and Preston Smith. The only question now is, what will be the end result?