In the lead-up to Super Bowl XLIX between the Patriots and Seahawks, I asked then-New England offensive line coach Dave DeGuglielmo about the problems presented to his offense by then-Seattle defensive end Michael Bennett. DeGuglielmo paused, sighed, and said plainly, “We don’t know how to block him.” As a Seattle-based writer, I had every idea just how good Bennett was, but even I was a bit gobsmacked when DeGuglielmo then compared Bennett to… Reggie White.
New England’s inability to block Bennett was proven in the game itself, and Bennett showed his versatility to a ridiculous degree. On New England’s first four offensive plays, Bennett lined up at left end, left tackle, right tackle, and right end, and hurried Tom Brady on three of those plays. The fourth play was a run. Bennett had already established himself as one of the league’s best multi-gap pass-rushers, but this was above and beyond. Bennett didn’t have a sack in the game, but he did generate five quarterback hits, a holding penalty, and he changed the entire structure of New England’s passing game—fearful of Bennett’s mad rush to the pocket, they went with quicker drops and more angular routes.
And now, with a to-be-finalized trade that will send the Eagles a fifth-round pick for Bennett and a seventh-round pick in return (Bennett spent the 2018 season with the Eagles after a trade from Seattle), the Patriots will have the man who once terrorized their quarterback in the most important game of the 2014 season.
Bennett’s older now, and one may wonder just how productive he can still be. In 2018, having turned 33 in November, Bennett amassed 12 sacks, 22 quarterback hits, and 44 quarterback hurries. That total of 78 pressures, per Pro Football Focus, tied Bennett for second in the league among edge rushers behind Dee Ford’s 83 with J.J. Watt and… Patriots defensive end Trey Flowers, who ended his 2018 season with 11 sacks, 16 hits, and 51 hurries. It’s not yet known whether the Bennett trade means that the Pats have given up on re-signing Flowers—the No. 1 impending free agent on my board—but from a financial and production perspective, this is a value adjustment of typically Belichickian proportions.
Flowers is expected to get $16-17 million per year with his next contract. He’ll turn 26 in August, he probably has his best football ahead of him, and he was the primary pass-rusher on New England’s defensive line. Bennett had more help in the form of Fletcher Cox, Brandon Graham, and Chris Long, but he still brought a ton of disruption. And when he officially becomes a Patriot, Bennett’s new team will be on the hook for a cap hit of just $7.2 million as part of the three-year, $29.5 million contract extension he signed with the Seahawks in 2016.
It’s a good value deal, but what will the Patriots get in Bennett as he jumps into his mid-thirties—generally a time when edge-rushers tend to fall off a cliff in terms of production? Based on his 2018 tape, this may be one of the better bargains of the 2019 offseason, because Bennett is still fully capable of consistent disruption from several different angles.
The Cowboys’ offensive line was the best Bennett faced last season, and he came away with four sacks of Dak Prescott in two games. He did so from the outside and from the inside of Philly’s defensive line, much as he did through his salad days in Seattle.
In this Week 14 sack/fumble combination, Bennett is playing inside the right tackle with Chris Long to his left. Bennett ran this all the time in Seattle with Cliff Avril, and he once told me that it was so effective because it forced the guard to respond to pressure as a tackle would. As Bennett said, “It’s too much space for him—it makes him regular. You take an in-the-box guy and make him outside the box, and he can’t handle it.”
Here, Bennett makes Zack Martin “regular,” and Martin is one of the best guards in the NFL. You can see that as Bennett approaches the offensive line, Martin seems unsure whether Bennett is going to stay on his outside shoulder or try an inside counter. Bennett stays outside, and Martin adjusts late. He can’t match Bennett’s speed around the interior edge, and the result is a sack and a fumble recovered by Brandon Graham.
That Bennett can still do this brings his specific value to the Patriots into a tighter focus, Last season, per PFF, Flowers spent 177 of his 581 pass-rushing snaps inside the defensive line, creating pressure on 20% of his interior snaps. Since 2015, Bennett has had 331 pass-rushing snaps from the interior defensive line, with 45 total pressures along the way. And as this play shows, he’s specifically effective aligned tightly with another defensive end to one side of the ball. Expect to see a lot more of this “quotaton mark” alignment in New England’s defense in 2019 as a result.
Not that Bennett has lost his touch on the edge, either. In Week 10, he beat the Cowboys for two sacks. One was on a slide protection play action away from his side where he just ran into the pocket and poleaxed Prescott, but on this one, he took left tackle Tyron Smith to the woodshed with a stab move, following that up by riding his outside shoulder to get to the pocket. Smith is one of the league’s best tackles, and he had no answer for Bennett here.
This tackle of Saints running back Alvin Kamara in the divisional round of the playoffs shows still more Bennett gap versatility, Here, he flips from 3-tech tackle to 1-tech nose tackle pre-snap and just demolishes Pro Bowl center Max Unger on the way to blowing the play up. Bennett’s diagonal alignment is reminiscent of the old Stunt 4-3 the Steelers of the 1970s used to use with Joe Greene, and it’s just as effective in the modern day.
Bill Belichick is better than anybody else in the NFL at a number of things, but two things have defined the Patriots’ almost two-decade dynasty: The recognition when it’s time to let a player go and test the market elsewhere, and the ability to identify veteran players who can fill important roles for far far less money and cap space. In acquiring Michael Bennett, the player who once tormented his all-time quarterback. Belichick has outdone himself yet again.
