As we’ve already told you, football can be hard to understand. Playbooks weigh as much as physics textbooks, and when you hear a quarterback barking in the huddle, it can sound like you’ve intercepted an alien transmission. For there to be order in the chaos, the game requires people who have mastered its specifics. Welcome to Masterminds Week, where we’ll spotlight those who have shown expertise in various aspects of the sport—from the big and all-encompassing to the random and hyperspecific.
Anyone who’s ever watched an NFL game with me knows that some of the sport’s tiniest details can bring me the most joy. Holding the remote while I’m in the room can be a miserable experience. Any time that a great play happens in the trenches, I ask to rewind just so I can get a second glimpse at a moment of football minutiae. When it comes to the game’s premier pass rushers, though, that esoteric curiosity reaches dangerous levels.
For the most part, defenders’ moves stem from a familiar set of options: There are speed rushes and power moves. But even if those approaches are fully established, the best players come up with iterations that feel new and enthralling. In a way, watching is akin to anticipating a finishing move from your favorite wrestler. It’s likely that you’ve seen some version of what’s coming before, but the spin that stars put on their maneuvers can make for the most exciting moment of the night.
As Masterminds Week comes to an end, I wanted to pay homage to some of those signature flourishes from the most prolific quarterback terrorizers on the planet. So after talking to a few and going to the tape, I’ve put together a list spotlighting the best of the best. These aren’t necessarily the moves that these guys use most often, but they’re the ones that can turn me into Jim Ross when he sees a Rock Bottom start to unfold. These are the instances when the true genius of the league’s top pass rushers becomes clear as day.
Cameron Wake: Speed Rush
The way that Wake sees it, offensive tackles assigned to him can do one of two things. “You can’t do two things at the same time,” Wake tells The Ringer. “You can either kick and be light on your feet … or you can sit, and you’re strong and stout.” Recognizing and reacting to what choice a tackle makes requires an edge rusher to be able to transition from a speed to a power move in an instant. And while Wake has plenty of such counters, the Dolphins standout is special because he’s so damn fast that he barely needs them.
Wake has developed into one of the preeminent sack men of his generation, racking up 11.5 last season and 81.5 since he entered the league in 2009. He famously started his career north of the border in the CFL, though, and beyond providing a great story, his time with the BC Lions also helped shape his pass-rushing style. The CFL features an extended neutral zone that’s a full yard longer than it is in the American game. Most of Wake’s work in Canada revolved around cutting down that distance as his first, second, and third priority. “When I got down here to the NFL, and I got to crowd back up to the ball, I got to use that to my advantage,” Wake says.
Entering his age-35 season, Wake still has arguably the fastest first step of any pass rusher in football, and it starts with the way he lines up. Wake’s four-point stance looks like a sprinter getting ready to come off the block. His body is coiled as tight as it can be, with his hands and feet staying as close together as possible. “It’s just pure, logical thinking,” Wake says. “If you put your feet farther back and your hands spread, your first step is not going to be beyond the line of scrimmage.”
His approach—and plenty of natural burst—guarantees that in the initial moment after the snap, he’s already deeper into the backfield than any pass rusher should reasonably hope to be. And that first step ensures that even when opposing tackles know what’s coming, there isn’t a whole lot they can do about it.
Julius Peppers: Hump Move
The hump move isn’t the one Peppers uses most often, but it belongs to him in this era of football because so few of his counterparts can use it. Reggie White made the move famous when he started feasting on quarterbacks in the mid-1980s. And for a player built like White, it was the perfect counter. Rather than bull-rush straight through an offensive tackle after switching from speed to power, White was so frighteningly strong that he could take his inside arm and knock an opposing tackle right on his ass.
You can count on one hand the number of pass rushers over the past century who’ve had White’s rare blend of speed and power. Peppers is one of them. His weight hovers right around 300 pounds, and even at 37 years old, Peppers’s ability to roast linemen off the edge instills fear in opponents. That leads to plenty of tackles trying to set for speed and electing not to anchor down. When that happens, Peppers eagerly doles out punishment.
Former Seahawks right tackle Garry Gilliam, who’s tasked with blocking Peppers in the above clip from Week 2 of the 2015 season, is listed at 303 pounds. Peppers sends him flying about 3 yards with a simple shove.
Aaron Donald: Arm Over
I’m with my Ringer colleague Danny Kelly when he says that Donald is the scariest pass rusher in football—full stop. As an interior rusher, he wrecks games in just about every way imaginable, and his signature move seems counterintuitive for a guy who scouts once deemed too short.
Donald can teleport into the backfield so fast that blocking him can feel like trying to stop Nightcrawler. What helps make him so dominant, though, is that his hands are just as fast as his feet. When Donald explodes into the B gap (between the center and guard) as a 3-technique tackle (lined up on the outside shoulder of the guard) and tries to beat guards to the outside, he has a remarkable feel for when to throw his hands. The timing he shows while chopping a guard’s hands down with one palm while swiping over the top with the other—all while propelling his body forward—is uncanny.
It may seem strange for a guy who stands 6-foot-1 to have an over-the-top finishing move, but Donald is so quick and smooth that he’s never exposed. I mean, look at this:
That stacks up with any Mortal Kombat fatality you’ll ever see.
Khalil Mack: Long Arm
The NFL’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year has a full repertoire of moves at his disposal, but his most devastating is the powerful counter he sets up after a series of speed rushes. Among speed-to-power techniques, an expertly deployed “long arm” may be the scariest for an offensive tackle.
Edge rushers go to a power move when they see a tackle taking a deep set and getting off-balance. With the commonly used bull rush, though, the lack of space between the rusher and the offensive tackle can allow the latter to reset and hunker down. The long arm prevents that.
The difference amounts to simple physics. Stand up and lean forward with both arms extended outward. Now do the same with one arm at your side. Notice how much farther you can go. That small gap in distance is what Mack uses to keep offensive tackles from regaining balance. “You just have to win with your hands,” former NFL lineman Geoff Schwartz tells The Ringer. “[Offensive linemen] practice getting long arms off all the time.”
A lineman’s only hope against the long arm is swiping it away before it hits his chest, but that gets at part of the reason Mack uses the move better than anyone else in the game. Tackles are so cognizant of his speed around the edge that they tend to focus on that at the expense of everything else. When Mack does unleash his 33 ¼-inch arm, few guys are equipped to handle it.
J.J. Watt: Jab and Go
The lesson to be learned about any specific NFL skill—whether it’s route running, pass blocking, or rushing the passer—is that breaking the rules is fine if you’re talented enough to overcome the potential drawbacks. Watt is one of the best athletes to come into the league in a long, long time, and his superior ability (combined with his innate understanding of when it’s smart to take risks) allows him to try shit that most guys wouldn’t dare attempt.
Watt amassed 74.5 sacks in his first five seasons, and he reached that total in a variety of ways. But his jab-and-go move best illustrates why he’s truly exceptional. It’s a maneuver Watt discussed with me during an interview three years ago, and of which Wade Phillips, who served as Watt’s defensive coordinator for three years in Houston, told me, “The first time you see it, you think about the old coaching adage, ‘You never go around the block.’ Well, you do when you can make the play.”
At the snap, Watt willingly abandons his assigned gap to give the impression that he’s darting inside. Then, he snaps back outside while swiping his hands over a lineman and barreling into the backfield. For a man who weighs 290 pounds, it’s all too sudden to make sense. And for a guard who reacts to Watt’s initial step in any way, it’s time to say goodnight.
Geno Atkins: Bull Rush
Atkins’s go-to move is easily explained: He might be the strongest defensive lineman in the league. The Bengals star has the burst to beat guards to the edge, but even when he doesn’t, he’s never actually neutralized. For Atkins, an offensive lineman isn’t a barrier; he’s merely a temporary impediment on the path to the quarterback.
Ravens All-Pro guard Marshal Yanda takes pride in having a unique pass-blocking style that helps him anchor down and stop bull rushes from just about every defensive tackle in the league. Atkins is the exception. “Usually when I hop [as a pass blocker], I refit and gain leverage,” Yanda told me for a story last month. “Normally, I can hop, get underneath, and [gain] leverage on a tall guy. But Geno’s shorter, so when I hop, he’s still underneath me. I can’t get underneath of him because he’s leveraged and he’s so strong.”
What was once thought to be Atkins’s most glaring weakness—his undersized 6-foot-1 stature—has become his biggest advantage.
Von Miller: Dip and Bend
Few defenders in the league are as physically gifted as Miller. The trait that pops off the tape, though, is his flexibility. Miller’s hands and ability to get tackles off his body are underrated compared to his other talents, but it’s what he does afterward that really sets him apart from anyone else.
“Bend” is a term that’s commonly used in regard to pass rushers, and it’s meant to describe how efficiently they can move their hips back in the direction of the quarterback as they glide past an offensive tackle. Miller takes that concept to the extreme, often to a degree that seems to defy our understanding of the general rules of the universe. By dipping his inside shoulder inches from the ground, Miller simultaneously limits the area in which an offensive tackle can latch onto him and redirects his body back in the direction of the man he’s trying to sack.
At times, this can look like an optical illusion. A person shouldn’t be able to get that close to parallel to the ground without falling over. Somehow, Miller does it while darting around a 300-pound lineman tasked with stopping him.
Joey Bosa: Swipe and Rip
Most of the counter moves highlighted in this piece focus on a pass rusher’s transition from speed to power. What makes Bosa such an intriguing case is that his signature play is actually the opposite.
Coming out of Ohio State in 2016, Bosa’s best skill as a pass rusher was the way he used his hands; the same held true during a rookie season in which he collected 10.5 sacks in 12 games. Bosa may be only 22 years old, but he already hand-fights as well as any pass rusher in the league. Just check out his patented hand swipe-and-rip move that ruined plenty of opposing linemen’s afternoons last fall.
Rather than feign a speed rush only to come back inside, Bosa often fakes a move that prompts tackles to sit down in their stance. “You can always take power steps to get him to throw his hands or set his feet for a power move,” Bosa tells The Ringer. “If you can get him to set his feet and lunge, then you have him where you want him.”
After an offensive tackle shows signs of hesitation, Bosa knocks away that lineman’s hands, jerking him off-balance and allowing the Chargers star to burst back to the outside. Instead of speeding up to slow down—the way so many great pass rushers thrive—Bosa slows down just to speed back up. “As long as you’re moving forward and keeping your hands active, I think you can be successful [with that move],” Bosa says.