Jordan Davis: Season Review/Preview

as training camp approaches we'll be reviewing several players performances during the 2023 season and discussing how they could impact the Eagles in the 2024 season today we'll be looking at Jordan Davis today we're looking at Jordan Davis and he is right now quite a polarizing figure in Philadelphia and it's kind of understandable why I meanu is a former first round pick that is really right now a first and second down run Defender and you kind of expect a little bit more than that out of a player pick that high let's look into some of his stats from 2023 to see how he fared when I like to look at defensive tackles and look at how good they are as a run Defender and how much they're impacting the game I like to look at what I call Run Stop rate which is how many tackles whether they're solos or assisted tackles and divided by how many run snaps they faced Jordan Davis was 41st out of 150 Defenders uh interior defensive lineman last season his stuff rate which would be tackles for loss or no gain would was 80th out of the top 150 Defenders interior defensive lineman last season listen he's a good but probably not great run Defender uh but he fits a certain role that I think while he may not be at leaded it right now I think he's very good at the role that he does play he's not a guy that's going to win behind the line of scrimmage he just doesn't have that lateral agility or firststep quickness and a lot of times the techniques that he's playing is he's really there to eat up double team so you see him playing a lot in what you would call a read and react mode where you're reading the movement of the offensive lineman and then attacking and moving based off of their alignment you're not getting a lot of tackles for L playing those techniques you're really there to eat up blocks and free up your uh your your linebackers or your overhang Defenders that have walked down uh towards closer to the line of scrimmage again like I said I don't think he's a guy that's going to be huge tackle for L player uh as he doesn't just he just doesn't have that quickness to get into the back field uh and and create those negative plays but he's good to have for defenses aiming to play a lot of too high coverages or light boxes because he can eat up extra blockers and the thing is even he does have enough size and strength that even if you get a a body in front of him a lot of the times he's compressing those gaps so some of the stuff that he does I don't think necessarily shows up and the box score and so I think he's always going to be a little bit underrated for what he actually does now in terms of was it worth taking a first round pick on a player like that that's a discussion for a different day but in terms of who he was as a player listen I know he gets a lot of hate but if you understand what his role is as a player I think he's right on track with where he should be maybe we hope to see him take a little bit of a step forward but I think we need to understand what this guy's going to be and he's probably going to be a first and second down run stopper for the majority of his career which isn't a bad thing if you look at Kirby Smart and Georgia he would just talk about how they wanted to stop the run with as few resources as possible so that they could dedicate more resources to the pass so even though he might not directly impact the game as a pass rusher on a consistent basis his ability to help the defense on early Downs allows him to defend the pass better in other ways but there's more to talk about his game but but what's what do you have to say about about Jordan Davis yeah and I'm sure like every Eagles fan after the first couple games you're getting super excited about him cuz he was popping off the screen like crazy and it was a it was definitely a dramatic slowdown and as opposed to Carter who maybe was a few little technique things um and better competition it was to me blatantly conditioning uh for Davis and it wasn't just week to week it was actually in the game like the first drive he would look like an all pro and then by the like end of the third quarter he just would just like nose dive into the turf and and like get no push at all um so my My overall opinion is when he's in condition and not very fatigued within the game and in a one-on-one matchup I think he's unbelievable like he's so strong and he's got good like leg Drive where he's collapsing the pocket really often um from the interior and like he he does seem to like have good like long arm move and just push the guys back into the pocket um he'll try to block shed too often for a guy of his stature I just don't see the point of it like to me it's better to push the guard or Center into the lap of the quarterback and disrupt their like throw stepping up into their throw as opposed to like trying to get around your guy and tackle the quarterback when any mobile quarterback if they see him coming can get away from him that's just like a small nitpick um the one thing that was disappointing is the double teams of course there's no player in the NFL that's consistently winning against double teams but I thought he was pretty much a dud um as soon as he got doubled he would get pushed back pretty much never beat them um and one one of the things you like to see as a run Defender is like you're mentioning you just eat up blocks and clog the interior lanes and when he was doubled I actually think they kind of were able to Usher him out of the lane that they were TR they wanted to run which that's where I'd like to see a big improvement from him now in these odd man fronts where you have kind of three interior linemen who are squished very close to the center and then the two Edge rushers outside that's getting one-on-one matchups way more often and potentially even against the center who tends to be you know 40 lbs less than Davis that's where I see him thriving um next season so I'm definit I probably am not as sour on him as most of the Eagles fan base and I think a lot of that attributable to his draft stock um so we'll see you know as you mentioned with Wilkins and sealer the snap count is expected to grow considerably for Davis and that's a scary proposition so that that's kind of uh what I see for Davis next year what's going to basically determine if it turns out that he's a success next year or not is just staying in conditioning and try to get him more one-on-one matchups yeah and he mentioned that at the end of last season is that he needed to be in better shape uh so hopefully that's something that he improves this offseason uh and that's also something fangio said in his press conference as well well he pointed out Carter and Davis as guys that conditioning is going to be huge for them so I think that's something that listen he knows the problem so hopefully he's doing enough to address it I don't think he's a guy like seeler ended up playing 33% of the snaps that was the one season under Vic fangio where anyone where more than one player played more than 30% of the snap share I see it as a situation where I I just don't see him taking a big enough chunk of the third down snaps to think he's going to get up to that level uh to that snapshare and realistically you shouldn't really expect too many guys that big to be able to play that many snaps it's just they tire out faster they're big guys there's a reason conditioning is an issue it's it's hard to play a lot of snaps and especially effectively at that size so I just don't know if he's ever going to be a topend pass rusher or excuse me snapshare guy and that's okay as long as you got know your rle and can play really well in that role and you the rest of your defensive line can fill in the gaps with you know some of the third down pass rushing stuff uh interesting interestingly enough you know as a pass rusher if you look at some of the metrics it's it's interesting to look at so let's look at this on his all Downs on all Downs the pass snaps that he had his pressure rate was 95th again this is out of the top 150 uh players on the interor of the defensive line last season he was 95th in pressure rate 93rd and pass rush win rate 84th in my pass rush score but he played a lot of first and second down snaps those snaps third down snaps you produce way higher pass rush win rates and and pressure rates just when defensive lineman know it's likely going to be a pass um they're they just get into pass mode and they don't have to worry if it's going to be a run as much looking at his third down pass rush stats his pressure rate was 63rd his pass rush win rate was 60th and his pass rush score is 59th so listen were those great numbers no uh and this that was also out of a 100 so it's not like you know it's it's not quite as good as looking at it the top 15 but when we talk about Milton Williams Milton Willam Williams numbers were actually lower than Jordan Davis's uh when looking at their third down pass rush snaps now these are on pretty low snap shares so I wouldn't take too much out of it um but it is interesting to think about like when he did get third down pass rush snaps he wasn't actually the worst pass rusher on the team I think what you said uh about him being a pocket Pusher you know collapsing Pockets from the interior I think that's really where he's going to live and get most of his pressures from is driving guys back to the quarterback I don't see him as a guy that's going to shed and win and Chase down quarterbacks too often uh you'll see it every now and again but I don't think that's how he's going to win a lot I think his best bet is collapsing the pocket from the inside which is going to help out the rest of the team and again like you might not see some of his snaps or his production show up in the Run game I think some of that's going to be similar in the pass game too and that he should be helping out other people and he just not going to get all much of the credit for it and I think the perfect dichotomy of his what he is as a pass rusher right now and I'm going to throw these two plays on the screen for people watching on YouTube there's two plays against Seattle One play he walked the center back back so into the quarterback and then another play is playing with high pad level and he doesn't look like he's a guy that's 350 or 40 pounds or whatever whatever he is he looks like a 290 pound defensive lineman that the center is able to set his anchor in because he just plays at a high pad level which a lot of times comes down to the conditioning Factor like you mentioned so hopefully he can improve in that area um but but we'll have to see at that point in time so I do you have any other thoughts on on JD going into next season yeah one of the things and we're going to touch on this in our long form podcast is it will be very interesting to see the rotation and what kind of fronts he uh Davis shows up in most so that's something that um stay tuned for yeah yeah that'll be that'll be a great conversation actually because I think there will be some um some information that's you wouldn't necessarily think you know fangio plays his defenses a certain way um but that's something stay tuned for in a couple days