He rushes predominantly from stand-up, outside alignments-but he doesn’t often drop into coverage, and he doesn’t really win the outside corner with speed.
Ingram has always been one of the more unique players in the league. Ingram has been more than a placeholder for Jones’s outside snaps he’s been legitimately good in his own right. #DALvsKC | #ChiefsKingdom /SjsVT3b4VE- Next Gen Stats November 22, 2021 The #Chiefs pass rush took advantage of a banged-up Cowboys OL, generating 5 sacks on non-blitzes (T-most in a game this season).Ĭhris Jones led KC with a season-high 7 pressures & 3.5 sacks, continuing his hot streak since switching back to IDL. But as Next Gen Stats shows us, the core truth remains the obvious explanation: Jones is just much better as an interior rusher than he is an outside rusher. Some of it is improved health some of it thanks to a better supporting cast, like Clark and Ingram some of it is because of easier opponents. Just like the Chiefs’ total defensive improvement, that leap has a lot of factors contributing to it.
Jones is fifth in Pro Football Focus’s pass rush productivity among all defensive linemen since Week 7 for predominantly interior rushers, his PRP of 10.4 is miles above the next closest player (Jonathan Allen at 8.5). Suddenly, Jones returned back to his traditional career distribution of snaps: a sprinkling of reps as a big defensive end, but a majority of reps at defensive tackle.Īfter returning from injury, Jones’s production skyrocketed. The snaps started to level out, especially when Ingram was added in Week 9. Jones missed Weeks 5 and 6-two more terrible weeks for the Chiefs’ defense-before returning in Week 7, with Clark active as well. It wasn’t a totally bad idea-Aaron Donald showed in 2020 that he could do a lot of damage from defensive end-but it was fairly evident, fairly quickly, that Jones’s impact was diminished by the new alignment. They tried to solve that problem with Jones, playing him almost exclusively as an outside pass rusher despite his All-Pro abilities on the interior. With Frank Clark injured for the beginning of the 2021 season and worryingly little depth behind him, the Chiefs had a defensive end problem to start the year. The best thing Melvin Ingram ever did for the Chiefs was put Chris Jones back where he belongs: on the defensive interior. Well, the village and Melvin Ingram, I suppose: The Chiefs traded for the Steelers’ pass rusher at the deadline, and he started taking snaps for them in Week 9, which was right around when the defensive leap began. It takes a village to be as bad as the Chiefs were, and it takes the village again to get as much better as they did.
It’s very rare to see a unit get this much better in one season, and accordingly, diagnosing just how they took the leap is really tough. This is where the Chiefs ranked in a few catch-all metrics when I wrote the piece after four weeks, and where they rank now in terms of season-long production. We can see this reflected in the numbers. The Chiefs’ are 6-1 through their past seven games, and their defense has not only returned to league-average levels, but surged to become one of the league’s most dominant defenses.
For the first time in Kansas City’s history under Andy Reid, the offense isn’t carrying the defense-it’s the other way around. But while the destiny of the Chiefs may be preordained, the process couldn’t have taken a sharper U-turn than my feeble October predictions. The Chiefs were on a historic pace in both offensive excellence and defensive ineptitude at the quarter pole of the season, and the Chiefs were in danger of losing the top seed in the AFC and failing down the playoff stretch.Īnd that conclusion remains true! The Chiefs are in danger of losing the top seed in the AFC- their 14 percent chance is third in the conference, behind the Patriots (45 percent) and Titans (22 percent)-and are 0-4 against current AFC playoff teams. I will not be gaslit into believing otherwise. Two months ago-almost to the day!-I dropped that piece on Kansas City’s defense, and I did it because I was right. There’s something rather important I forgot to mention. The author argued that the Chiefs defense was “bad enough that it could derail the team’s Super Bowl aspirations.” He claimed that the Chiefs were “on pace to be the league’s worst defense this season.” The only hope Kansas City had, the author foolishly argued, was that the offense would be “so good that none of this will matter.”Īh, wait. Earlier this season, someone wrote a very silly and shortsighted piece about the Chiefs defense.