2025 Washington Commanders- All Things Defense

Raheem Morris has never had a top-10 defense, as a defensive coordinator. He has such a weird coaching history--went from DBs coach to HC in Tampa; then was a DC with the Rams where his defenses stunk. He's a DB coach and his pass defenses in LA never ranked higher than 22nd in yards? How is this guy a HC?

I'd rather have Ulbrich, Gannon, Rallis (if he becomes available), or go after Seattle's defensive staff. Morris seems like a bigger name Joe Whitt.

Yeah Morris was way more in the mold of a Dan Campbell personality/leadership hire, and that doesn’t always work out. Except Campbell at least has a deep history as an assistant on both sides of the ball and produced as a top Special Teams coach as well when he got his chance. Very similar to John Harbaugh, actually, who was kind of out of nowhere when the Ravens gave him the job as a Secondary coach and former ST’s coach.

So yeah Morris interviews well and is really liked across the league but has definitely had a strange journey where his merit as a position coach and coordinator was never the main factor. Always a huge risk. I agree I wouldn’t want him anywhere near this D, I want someone proven and schematically innovative in recent years.

Aaron Glenn falls into the same category, hate to say. Really rough look for a league that’s actively trying to incentivize diversifying HC candidates, and the guys they DO then hire turn out to be questionably qualified personality hires who were able to win over a hiring committee (no small accomplishment) but then aren’t setup to succeed at all, and end up fired within a year or two.

Part of this that nobody wants to talk about is that a huge percentage of the nepotism that benefits the white developing future coordinators in this league happens on the sexy offensive side of the ball, who are more likely to move up and eventually be young HC candidates (and because nepotism is built on prior relationships, of course most of these guys come from super white coaching trees, hire their buddies and their buddies’ sons and grandsons and nephews as quality control grunts who then are set up to develop over time into position coaches, play callers, etc on the offensive side of the ball which sees more HC hires these days).

So then you get a bunch of Kubiak cousins or whatever seen as being viable candidates, without that much diversity in offensive play callers or play designers across the league. And non-white candidates are more so working their way up the league on the less popular, lower-trajectory defensive side of the ball and have to create reputations as “leaders of men” and win over old white billionaire owners with charisma instead of resume a lot of the time. It’s a lose-lose situation for a lot of these guys, and it starts early in their careers with a ton of high quality entry-level offensive coach positions being taken up by a deep pipeline of nepo babies (who to be fair do often develop into good coaches—but it’s an opportunity thing).

But that’s a post for another board.
 
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If there is such a stat, one of my primary metrics for our next DC would be 1st half vs 2nd half results. One of APs reported strengths when hired was the appropriate use of data driven technology. Bring to us the DC who has been shown to be among the best at adjustments. It seems to have been forever since we had a staff that outcoached the opposition.
 
If there is such a stat, one of my primary metrics for our next DC would be 1st half vs 2nd half results. One of APs reported strengths when hired was the appropriate use of data driven technology. Bring to us the DC who has been shown to be among the best at adjustments. It seems to have been forever since we had a staff that outcoached the opposition.

At this point, it looks like AP prefers to hire the HC and let him form his staff. I assume if the HC asks him for data he will hopefully readily provide it - or better still, it would probably be great if he offered data without being asked.
 
The sad thing is that as middling as the offense is right now, if the defense was at least as good as the current offense, the team would probably at least be .500 going into the Miami game.
 
At this point, it looks like AP prefers to hire the HC and let him form his staff. I assume if the HC asks him for data he will hopefully readily provide it - or better still, it would probably be great if he offered data without being asked.

We’ve got a whole football analytics department these days, and I imagine they provide all sorts of weekly reports on future opponents, plus self-scouting and broader league trends, etc. to the FO and coaching staff, plus whatever else is specifically tasked
 


Somehow I don’t think Whitt was doing this


He was trying match zone early on this season but it wasn’t being taught properly or our secondary players are too dumb, namely Quan.

From the replies to this,


Totally forgot about Jim. He was a bigtime rising star in college football a few years ago. The dude has a lot of playcalling experience from his time in college and has now spent a couple years on the Payton defensive staff as the #2 guy helping to implement these coverage principles.
 
He was trying match zone early on this season but it wasn’t being taught properly or our secondary players are too dumb, namely Quan.
DQ did mention in a couple of post game pressers that the players were not in the right spaces. I am imagining that some of that is a player or two freelancing or not getting it like you mention.

Watching it looked more like the whole D was off, not just one player. It also looked like our corners were not very good in man and gave away too much space.

It's really a shame Latimore didn't live up to expectations that trade has hurt us. So has our inability to bring pressure and make adjustments to counter offenses
 
Lattimore might have been part of the problem but I won't pretend to know that he was the real problem. I just know that he can't be the only problem when it's completely obvious that receivers are sitting there wide open on just about every single passing play for over a month.

When your defense is going to let the opponent score every single time they touch the ball you can have the NFL All Pro team on offense and you are still probably going to lose.
 
1. As was pointed out to me, Armstrong was hurt against Chicago (we were 3-2 before that game) and we lost by 1. He came back against Dallas, and got hurt again. We were 3-4 after that game. Now, if you’re alluding to the fact that we then had to face Seattle, KC and Detroit, and therefore the season was in effect over at that point, fair enough.
2. Yeah, regarding injuries, I only said our injuries compounded an already questionable defensive roster. I also said the Lions had far more defensive injuries last year, but they had a far better defense before that point (and an elite offense to pick up the slack, which we haven’t had this year).
3. I’d argue our defense was a pretty big part of why we won the games we did. With that said, much of that was because we faced the Raiders, NYG’s bad oline, and LAC’s banged up oline. I think we were always going to struggle defensively against decent offenses and get blown out by good ones.

At the end of the day, I don’t know that you and I are that far apart - our defensive roster was pretty poor to begin with, Whitt hasn’t gotten them to show up vs anyone but bad offenses (bad olines really), and the injuries just make it all even worse. Our offense hasn’t done a great job picking up the slack (which is far more understandable given the injuries on that side of the ball).
My point remains other than the injuries to Jayden, no team can win when their starting QB is out, the injuries are not the reason we our season ended in October. An injury to TM and Armstrong, the only injured players who have played well this season, should never turn a contender into a 3-4 win season. Of course there are a lot of other injuries, but we are talking about players like Will Harris or Baptiste, not Adan Hutchison. It wouldn't have mattered.

Every team has injuries to their top players. I'm just tired of the injury excuse, , the team from coaching to the players have sucked this season.
 
Well the D played more respectable than they have in the recent past. Lets keep Whitt in the rear view. They did still give up a lot of rushing yardage except when battling in the red-zone.
 
Well the D played more respectable than they have in the recent past. Lets keep Whitt in the rear view. They did still give up a lot of rushing yardage except when battling in the red-zone.
This one was on the offense. Defense bent but did not break for the majority of the game.
 
Our defense held to field goals, forced punts, and had two impressive goal line stands today. They get high marks, really this was one of their best games of the year despite missing Payne, Lattimore, Amos, et al.

You cannot blame this loss on the D. Our problems today were special teams (two missed field goals and a muffled punt), turnovers (lost the turnover battle 2-0), and red zone offense. Take even one of those errors away and we probably win.
 
This one was on the offense. Defense bent but did not break for the majority of the game.

Moreso special teams with two missed field goals and a muffed punt, but yes, the redzone woes and interception on offense could have been the difference too.
 
The move to Quinn on defense was not so much about recreating the 85 Bears but about demoting Whitt because failure at some point requires accountability.

Although I do think that focusing on the defense will give Quinn more to go on in detail in evaluating the players and getting a feel for them on a week to week basis.

We need to move on from Payne and Lattimore.

These two are all about the money and are guys hitting the back end of their careers.

Notice how Payne seems to come in shape and focuses when a new contract is on the sniff?

He’s a bum. Let someone else play the soon to be 30 year old.

Veterans we bring in here need to leaders.
 
Only 39% of defensive snaps for Newton. On a week with Payne out I expected more. Disappointing but perhaps he picked up a knock.
 
That kinda tracks with how they were running the ball. Newton isn't the strongest run defender.
 
Sainristil with one of his best games this year playing outside. It’s been a duh to the fans for weeks he should be playing out there but apparently these coaching geniuses thought it would be a good idea to punt on that until they absolutely needed to
 

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