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Let’s talk about defensive statistics for a second, shall we?
Week 11 of the 2019 season. The Lions lose to the Cowboys, 35-27, and Trey Flowers’ official line looks like this: zero tackles, zero sacks, three quarterback hits. It’s the only game for him over a six-game stretch, spanning late October to early December, in which he fails to record a sack; it’s the only game all season in which he doesn’t have a tackle. Look back on it now and it appears to be evidence for anyone calling Flowers’ first Detroit season a disappointment, after he signed a $90 million contract.
Here’s the thing: Those numbers against the Cowboys are a mirage. They’re completely misleading.
True, Flowers didn’t sack Dak Prescott on that Sunday. But, matched up for most of the afternoon with all-world left tackle Tyron Smith, Flowers consistently created havoc for the Cowboys’ offense. He was a force, stats be damned.
On Dallas’ first offensive play, for example, Flowers looped inside from a five-tech alignment, cleared center Travis Frederick and was just about to pop Prescott but the Cowboys’ QB fired a quick, comeback route. The next snap resulted in an Ezekiel Elliot fumble. In the NFL’s gamebook, Jarrad Davis received credit for a tackle, forced fumble and fumble recovery. In reality, none of it happens without Flowers:
Another
one for your consideration. Flowers spent a lot of this game trying to beat
Smith with leverage and power, mixing in an occasional spin move back toward
the inside. Here, though, he dips his shoulder wide and turns the corner on the
Cowboys’ left tackle. If the Lions’ coverage holds for another split-second,
this is a clean sack and maybe a forced fumble.
Instead, it’s a QB hit … and nothing else.
And that’s the way a lot of
the 2019 season went for Flowers — he was very, very close from
pushing his decent Detroit debut (7.0 sacks, 51 tackles) toward high-end
production. Just 18 players had double-digit sacks last season; it doesn’t take
much imagination to believe Flowers could’ve been the 19th.
Would he have gotten there
if he’d been 100 percent all season? Or if he’d had a little more help from
those around him on the first and second levels?
Even acknowledging that he
had a few disappointing outings — Green Bay and Minnesota both neutralized
Flowers rather effectively — the good far outweighed the bad. If the 2019 season was merely a
hint of what’s to come, Flowers could be an All-Pro threat for the Lions’
defense.
Here’s a closer look at why:
The production
You can almost draw a line
down the middle of Flowers’ season and pinpoint when he started to feel like
his old self. Remember, his final Patriots season didn’t end until Super Bowl
LIII on Feb. 3, 2019, then he required minor shoulder surgery before signing
with Detroit the following month. He opened training camp on the PUP list and
didn’t play at all in the preseason.
There were flashes of the
full Trey Flowers repertoire early on, nonetheless. He recorded eight tackles and a sack in a Week 3
win at Philadelphia, plus showed off his versatility in the process — he took
26 of his 52 snaps from the left side of Detroit’s line, another 22 on the
right and a handful over the ball. The following Sunday, he played well
again as the Lions nearly sprung an upset on the Chiefs.
But the moment when Flowers
(and the coaching staff) knew he was all the way back didn’t truly come until
Week 8, against the Giants.
Midway through the fourth quarter of that game, Flowers absolutely
tossed left tackle Nate Solder and sacked QB Daniel Jones. One player later,
Flowers extended his left arm, brace and all, and bench pressed Solder back
into Jones’ lap for a sack. Pure power.
Flowers later missed Detroit’s Week 12 game
against Washington with a concussion, but it’s fair to say that any lingering
concerns over his shoulder or his strength vanished over the season’s final two
months. For the year,
Sportradar credited Flowers with 35 QB pressures, a top-20 mark. Over November
and December (despite missing a game in that window), Flowers climbed even
higher.
Stretched out over a full 16-game
season, that pace would’ve given Flowers 46 pressures — the same number Nick
Bosa had in ’19 and two shy of what Flowers himself produced in 2017. And of
his 7.0 sacks, six of them came from the Giants game on. It took a bit to rev
up the engine, but Flowers eventually reached his typical production.
That helps explain why GM
Bob Quinn was willing to commit so much money to Flowers: He’s a coveted
high-ceiling/high-floor guy, and we might not have seen him at his peak yet. Check
out this model of consistency:
How
much more is left untapped?
The usage
Don’t want to get too bogged down in the details here, but a
moment to revisit Flowers’
versatility. Or his “multiplicity,” which
is one of Matt Patricia’s favorite buzzwords — this idea that the Lions want offensive and defensive
units that are matchup-proof. Having players who can shift seamlessly
from one spot to another is central to that plan.
Flowers fits.
He’s primarily an edge guy, but with a skill set that allows him to travel
along the defensive line. Here’s where Detroit used him in 2019:
While
Flowers spent the vast majority of his time aligned off the right side of
Detroit’s line (approximately 80 percent of his snaps), there were some weeks —
Philadelphia, Oakland — when the Lions flipped him in pass-rush situations.
Maybe it was the matchup, maybe they saw something in how those offenses
attacked. Whatever the reason, Flowers had no trouble moving down the line.
I also had it in mind that Flowers played inside more than he
actually did. He finished at almost 30 percent between zero- and four-tech
spots, but that number is skewed by the 58 snaps he took as a three-tech in
Week 17.
Patricia has a ton of variations within his fronts. When he used
three down linemen, however, the options that showed up most often:
- A zero-tech and two five-techs, usually with an
additional stand-up defender on each side of the line.
- An Okie front that’s more of a condensed 3-4
setup, with a nose tackle over the ball, then a DT in each 3-gap.
- A more spread-out look, at times almost mimicking a
3-3-5 stack, featuring two three-techs and a five-tech.
It was within that second setup that Flowers saw most of his
three-tech snaps. His rarer one-tech moments typically came when the Lions
dropped to a 2-4-5 front and rushed two down linemen from the A-gaps, flanked
by linebackers on the edge.
The point being: Flowers, while most effective in that five- to
seven-tech space, provided a little bit of everything last season. Patricia
probably will lean into that even more if the Lions’ young edge rushers develop
and command playing time.
The player
It is — and this is something of a mea culpa as
someone who covers the team, too — easy, at times, to overlook Flowers because
he’s not a freaky athlete off the edge. He’s not a pin-your-ears-back defender
who just flies around tackles, play after play.
He’s a technician, so it’s easy to see why Patricia is so fond
of the ex-Patriot. The reps happen where Flowers bends the edge and beats a
lineman wide, but more often you’ll see him getting into a tackle’s pads and
rerouting him. And, not to get hung up on this point too much, he was a few
steps here or there from a much more impressive statistical season.
Another example that puts it all together:
That is a phenomenal move
against Chiefs right tackle Mitchell Schwartz, and one that doesn’t happen on a
whim. Flowers had a plan for that pass rush. If Mahomes doesn’t somehow manage
to get this throw off despite Flowers’ hand swiping down at the ball, it goes
into the books as a strip sack. Instead? Another QB hit and a pressure.
This was a recurring theme.
I’d compare it to a baseball player who bats .270 but with a putrid BABIP
(batting average on balls in play). Some of it, frankly, is just bad luck. If,
time and again, you hit it on the screws right at people, what else can you do?
A few more of those shots find a hole and you’re batting .300 … just like if
Flowers had converted two or three close calls, he’d have been up among the top
pass rushers of 2019.
“Yeah, I think Trey Flowers played exceptionally well,”
Quinn said at his end-of-season presser. “I
think Trey, the first couple of weeks of the season, was still kind
of battling through the shoulder thing. But once he turned it on, I think he played really well for us in
all aspects – run defense, pass defense, quarterback hits, hurries, sacks.”
That last point is a key one, because the Lions trust Flowers in all
situations. In fact, he might have the highest awareness level of anyone who
took snaps among Detroit’s front seven last year.
He rarely took himself out
of position, even against teams that used a lot of QB-read concepts like the
Cardinals or Cowboys — see, again, the “tackle” of Elliott above. And when
Flowers aligned as a five-tech or wide, the Lions frequently asked him to jam a
releasing tight end/back before rushing. He even dropped into coverage 21
times, per my rewatch.
Flowers was, in short, the Lions’ most well-rounded defender last
season.
Which should make the fact
that he had clear room for improvement awfully encouraging. Most notably,
Flowers missed eight tackles last season — up from two in 2018 — including an
absolutely clean shot on QB Jameis Winston. A sack there would’ve been his
career-best eighth for the year. Instead, he whiffed.
Offensive linemen also found
some success, especially early in the year as he battled the shoulder issue,
wiping out Flowers on run plays. This, from the first matchup with Green Bay:
That’s a bad rep from
Flowers, as guard Elgton Jenkins takes him out of the play. However, at the
same time it spotlights something that hurt Flowers — and the defense as a
whole — last season: shaky play from the second and third levels of the
defense. On the long run by the Packers’ Jamaal Williams, Jarrad Davis shoots
into the wrong gap and the safeties fail to cover it up. Williams turns a
six-yard run into a 45-yarder, right through Flowers’ gap.
This was just reality,
Flowers often operating without a safety net. When the linemen didn’t finish,
too many runs turned into big gains because of a lack of second-level support.
On passing downs, if the Lions didn’t scheme Flowers into one-on-one rush
situations, opposing offenses tossed extra bodies at him because they weren’t
afraid of anyone else.
Still, Flowers tended to be a handful in one-on-one spots, and some of
the Lions’ best blitzes came when he occupied multiple blockers and a
linebacker shot into the backfield behind him. A lot of things that don’t show
up in final stat line.
All of these positive
moments need to happen with more regularity, but Flowers’ numbers don’t paint
the entire picture on his 2019 play.
The future
I’ve given away the ending
already: Lions fans should be excited about the possibilities. The statistical
expectations for Flowers probably need to stay somewhat tempered for a couple
of reasons:
- He’s
not a pure pass rusher in the mold of a Von Miller or Justin Houston, so
much of his value still lies in how the Lions can move him around their
fronts.
- This
specific scheme doesn’t always turn its pass rushers loose, like when the
Lions rush three and drop eight — those are stacked odds. Patricia often
just wants to pin quarterbacks in the pocket.
Even so, Flowers’ work over the final
two-plus months of 2019 and against some of the game’s top tackles should point
the arrow upward. What remains to be seen is how much help he’ll get.
One thing that rewatching
all of Flowers’ snaps hammered home is just how much Detroit swapped out up
front. When Da’Shawn Hand and Mike Daniels were ailing, the Lions’ primary line
usually featured Flowers, Damon Harrison and A’Shawn Robinson, plus Devon
Kennard as the hybrid DE/OLB. Three-quarters of that grouping is gone.
On paper, it’s easy to plug
in Danny Shelton for Harrison, Hand/Nick Williams for Robinson and Austin
Bryant/Julian Okwara for Kennard, but that makes for a lot of moving parts.
Will those changes be upgrades? Will they ease some of the burden that landed
on Flowers’ shoulders last season as the team’s most disruptive lineman?
Something to file away for
later, perhaps: An interesting shift that happened late, once Bryant rejoined
the lineup. Patricia, on several occasions, utilized the rookie as his
third-down edge rusher from the right side, with Flowers as a one- or
three-tech next to him. Flowers wasn’t nearly as effective an inside pass
rusher as he was outside, but a Bryant-Flowers pairing — mirrored on the other
side by, say, Hand and Julian Okwara — might maximize the Lions’ athletic
personnel on third downs.
Patricia should let Flowers
get after offensive tackles as much as possible, but … options. Flowers’
ability to play from any technique frees up a lot of possibilities.
Of course, the biggest
factor for Flowers is that he’s healthy. Whenever the Lions are able to
reconvene this summer, he should be able to handle a full workload — and, in
turn, hit the ground running in Week 1. That’s huge. He didn’t have that chance
last year, and it took almost half the season for him to establish any
semblance of game-to-game consistency.
If he finds it early in
2020, Flowers has a chance to take his game to another level. He wasn’t far off
from making that happen in 2019.
(Photo:
Tim Fuller / USA Today)
