Philadelphia Eagles Wide Nine Technique: Week 3 Assessment

By now we've all followed the Eagles change from a hard blitzing to a coverage style defense.  The Jim Johnson pressure days are over, ushered out slowly by Sean McDermott and now but a memory under Juan Castillo. Enter Jim Washburn, guru of the Tennessee Titans and the wide nine technique.

For those unfamiliar with the technique, the defensive ends in a four down linemen set, line up far outside of the offensive line.  Rather than a step shaded outside of the tackle or tight end, the defensive ends are two to three yards off of the outside lineman. 

The benefit to this technique is speed.  A defensive end starting in a sprinter's stance on all fours will face a offensive tackle who, when pass blocking, is already stutter stepping backwards, with a solid three to four steps to gain momentum.  Give me the guy going forward over the guy going backward any time at that speed.

There are, however, disadvantages.  With your tackles still maintaining their one- or three-gap technique, that leaves a lot of open acreage for a running back to bust through untouched.  Back to this in a moment.

As we've seen in the first few weeks, Jason Babin and Trent Cole and the other Eagles defensive ends have been chewing up and spitting out opposing offensive lines.  With nine tackles and four sacks, Babin is already fourth in the NFL in sacks.  With 14 tackles and three sacks, Cole is seventh in the NFL in sacks.  If this keeps up, both are Pro Bowl candidates. 

However, back to the disadvantage of the technique.  To fill those open gaps, a defense needs strong, run-controlling linebackers.  The Eagles so far have lacked this. 

In Week 4, we will see the changing of the guard, if you can call changing from your fourth-round rookie to your sixth-round rookie a changing of the guard.  Brian Rolle gets the nod this week while Casey Matthews gets acquainted with the bench.

Knowing the weakness of this technique and having some idea of the successes up front, you'd figure the Eagles would have placed an off-season importance on building the linebacker corps.

Unfortunately, Eagles followers all understand the importance of drafting linebackers in the Andy Reid era.  The Eagles have not drafted a linebacker in the first round since 1979. 

Reid has drafted a LB in the second round only three times in his 12 years.  It just isn't an important position to him.

No defensive scheme exists without a weakness.  The weakness, however, needs to be mitigated with a set of strong players to rebuke any advance by the offense. 

That just does not exist here.  The wide nine technique is a great one, but look for the Eagles to continue to struggle with it until they fix the linebacker problems.