Don't do it, Johnny G!

The Cardinals have invested heavily in their defensive line, but Jonathan Gannon should continue to embrace the chaos that defined his approach last season

No team attacked a roster weakness as aggressively as the Cardinals this offseason. Arizona poured cash and draft picks into upgrading its defensive line, spending big on Josh Sweat in free agency, adding veterans Calais Campbell and Dalvin Tomlinson along the interior, drafting Walter Nolan in the first round and scooping up Jordan Burch in the third.

It’s a tasty haul. Sweat brings one-on-one pass-rush know-how. Campbell and Tomlinson add a veteran presence to a youthful locker room. Burch has a shot to be an early contributor on the edge. Nolan may be the most talented interior lineman in the rookie class, a speed-to-power wrecking ball who can play all across the formation.

It was a needed overhaul. The Cardinals battled through last season with the worst collective pass-rush in the league. They churned through a batch of career backups or former first-round flops in a bid to manufacture any threat. Hey, there’s LJ Collier! Whoa! A Victor Dimukeje sighting! Wait, are the Cardinals building their pass-rush around Dante Stills?!?!

That the defense was competitive at all was a testament to the team’s coaching staff and the group’s collective effort. They may have lacked talent, but the Cardinals’ front was physical, mean and unrelenting. Still, the end result was a putrid pass-rush. They ranked in the bottom three in the league in pressure rate and pass-rush win rate. Taken together, the interior defensive line and edge-defenders ranked 31st in havoc rate, the lowest combined ranking of any team in the league – and this in a league that included the Panthers. The linebacker room finished 26th in havoc rate, according to Field Vision.

It was dreary. The Cards lacked one-on-one winners who could consistently probe or collapse the pocket. For half the year, the group relied on Dennis Gardeck, a, umm, fiery, effort-based rusher who cannot even crack the team’s roster these days. By the end of the season, Collier led the team with 24 total pressures. Zaven Collins posted 21. Gardeck, the most consistent menace, hit just 11 total pressures in seven games. The pass-rush was so futile that Baron Browning, acquired from the Broncos at last year’s trade deadline, finished with the fifth-most pressures on the squad by the end of the season.

The offseason additions now give the Cardinals a solid-looking rotation. And you can tack on recent investments that missed most or all of last season: 2024 first-round pick Darius Robinson missed a chunk of his rookie season with a calf injury and didn’t look healthy when he returned; 2023 second-round pick BJ Ojulari missed all of his sophomore campaign with a torn ACL. Add that pair to the offseason investments and it’s tough to think of a group that has had more of a substantive upgrade this offseason. Finally, the Cardinals will enter a year with some legit pop in their pass-rush.

But the recent additions pose an interesting question: What does Jonathan Gannon want his defense to look like?

Back in his days as the Eagles' defensive coordinator, Gannon ran an off-brand version of FangioBall — including bringing Vic Fangio into the building whenever he was available to help out. In Arizona, without an intimidating four-man pass-rush, Gannon has been forced to switch things up. In 2024, he chose chaos, leading the most havoc-based defense in the league: havoc up front, havoc in the secondary, havoc in the minds of opposing coaches and quarterbacks. And it kind of, sort of worked. But the new faces fit more with the old Gannon vision: a deep, powerful, springy group of pass-rushers that can rotate on and off the field and blaze away in four-man groupings, with passive coverages behind. Yet what Gannon and his staff hit on last year was something different, maybe more important: the most distinctive defensive identity in the league.

The Cardinals' defense may have been an afterthought last season, but there was magic happening in the desert. They cracked some structural codes that other defenses have been chasing, and will soon imitate.

What’s the plan for 2025? Will Gannon revert to his old Philly ways or press ahead with the confuse-and-clobber approach?

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Gannon’s style in Philadelphia was simplistic. It was four down, four deep football. The defensive backfield, largely, sat in match-quarters coverage, a form of pseudo man-coverage where the coverage typically unfolds with the corners moving from zone to man and the safeties helping to bracket routes in the middle of the field. Linebackers played drop-and-rally football. Up front, Gannon released the hounds. The Eagles ran eight deep with every style of pass-rusher, inside and on the edge. Gannon cycled through edge pairings. One side would swoop up the arc, the other would crush the pocket out-to-in, putting a vice around the quarterback’s happy place. Inside, Gannon clubbed offensive linemen over the head with every variation of stunt and twist. With the talent and depth at his disposal, Gannon could toggle between groups to blend the right skills and keep everyone fresh. It was damn effective: the Eagles broke the regular season sack record.

But Gannon’s 2022 group as a whole was fairly passive. The coverages were static. Corners did not offer hard re-routes. There were few rotations or disguises. There was little fluidity to the front. Even within their preferred coverages, there were few nuances. They simply lined up and tried to out-talent all in front of them. As a form of Fangio-ism, it was reductive. But it did work (until it didn’t).

Trying to transplant that style elsewhere was always going to be tough. You need the horses up front. Gannon hasn’t had the luxury of a rotating cast of top-tier rushers in Arizona; in Gannon’s final season with the Eagles, Haason Reddick had more pressures individually than Gannon’s top 2024 cohort had combined.

Given the lack of sauce up front, Gannon was forced to break the glass last year. Out went the static, rigid, four-down, four-deep looks. In came a wackadoo style, full of disguises, rotations, blitzes, pressures, traps, malleable coverages, and bizarro-looking fronts. It was different. It was creative. It was outstanding coaching.

Gannon adjusted to his new environment, empowering defensive coordinator Nick Rallis to conjure a new system that could offset the team's lack of pass-rush juice. Given the dearth of talent up front, the Cardinals took on a madcap approach, altering their entire defensive structure week to week – sometimes quarter to quarter, sometimes drive to drive. They would major in one thing for a drive or two, and then pivot (HARD) to a fresh approach. The team’s edge-defenders and interior pass-rushers may not have caused opposing OCs and quarterbacks sleepless nights, but no defense was harder to gameplan against last season, given the sheer volume of stuff Gannon and Rallis chucked at the wall to keep opposing offenses off-kilter.

Even when things were working, the Cardinals would take on a new identity as games evolved, trying to set the terms for the offense and throw quarterbacks out of rhythm. They were one of only three defenses in the league where their EPA/play improved every quarter.

Things calcified towards the end of the season, but the Cardinals still shapeshifted between any number of fronts, coverages, or pressure packages to attack opponents' weaknesses.

It was a radical departure from what Gannon and Rallis had coached in Philadelphia. They switched from running the most predictable defense in the league to the toughest to figure out. Each component part of the scheme was given a reskin. Everything was overhauled: he coverages they based out of, the volume they ran those coverages, and how they got to them. The one-time pressure pacifists also embraced a pressure-and-disguise style more familiar to Brian Flores or Vance Joseph.

Rarely has a coach with such a clear schematic philosophy pivoted so hard in the opposite direction.

The big-picture figures are telling. But there was more going on under the hood.

Take the team’s blitz total. In their final year together in Philly, Gannon and Rallis blitzed at a 22.1% clip. Last year in Arizona, that figure jumped to 28.6%. It’s not an enormous difference, but the duo overhauled how they approached the pressure world. With the Eagles, Gannon opted for single-man, interior blitzes. They were designed to have a fifth-rusher (typically a linebacker) clog up one of the offense's interior linemen, creating one-on-one rush opportunities for his four down linemen.

With the Cardinals, Gannon has transformed his approach. He lit up offenses last season with every pressure design you could conceive – and some you could not. The single-man interior blitzes took on a lighter role in the defense. He swapped out the Fangio-style fire zones (a five-man pressure with zone coverage behind) from the rest of his pressure portfolio with what can only be described as bonkers shit.

There were some league-wide classics, but different pressures (and different pressure paths) every quarter. There were still some of the vintage four-down, let-everyone-leap-off-the-ball reps, but Gannon largely pivoted to a pressure system based on deception, with mugged up linebackers helping to set the protection so that he could attack it from different angles.

Yeesh!

Away from the front, Gannon also altered his structure on the back-end. He ramped up his use of all-out pressures, playing without a deep defender on 5% of the Cardinals' snaps. His defenses have traditionally been based out of a two-deep shell, allowing them to sink into those match-quarters coverages. But last season, Gannon decided to bounce between looks, cranking up his usage of middle-of-the-field closed designs (a single deep safety). The switch gave the Cardinals a more varied coverage diet, but also boosted the team’s pressure packages. When Gannon phoned in a blitz with the Eagles, it was a basic changeup, with the defense moving from those two-deep safety looks into a single-high look with the lone blitzer. But last season, Gannon also amped up his blitz rate from his traditional two-deep shells, including his beloved match-quarters looks. On average, the Cardinals blitzed 20% of the time they were in a two-deep shell last season, a 15% increase from Gannon’s final year in Philly, when he was first toying with new-fangled pressure packages. Only Brian Flores (and Brian Flores lives in a universe of his own) was so comfortable sending heat from a two-man shell – which can lead to an ocean of space vacated at the intermediate level of the field.

In the past, Gannon’s defense was segmented: It was a two-deep shell with a four-man rush, or he rolled into a single-high shell if he was sending his lone blitzer. Last season, who the hell knew what was happening? Everyone, at all levels, was a threat to attack the backfield – linemen, linebackers, edges, safeties, corners. Everyone was also prepared to drop into coverage or to roll from their initial starting point to somewhere else on the field. It was mayhem.

Given the mayhem, the Cardinals’ four-man pressure rate tracked well-above their talent level, thanks largely to a bounty of simulated looks.

Arizona also ranked fifth in the league in early-down blitz rate, something that would have been anathema to Gannon back in Philly, but that tracks with what the best and brightest are doing across the league. It wasn’t just a shift, but a complete teardown of everything Gannon had coached before.

Rallis was one of the chief architects of the shift. The Cardinals’ coordinator is one of the best young defensive minds in the league. He isn’t an innovative designer, but he ID’s the right stuff to pilfer – and he knows when to deploy it. Rallis worked in tandem with Gannon back in their Philly days, when Rallis was the Eagles linebacker coach. In Philadelphia, Rallis was tasked with designing, installing, and sprinkling in some of the new-age pressure voodoo that evaded Gannon during much of his time in the coordinator chair.

(The subtle differences in the terminology may sound confusing. The definitions for sim pressures, creeper pressure, and zone pressures are not always standardized. This is what I roll with for TRO: Sending six defenders after the QB is a blitz; sending five defenders is a pressure; sending four but with an unexpected dropper is a creeper; a defense presenting like it will send five or six but sending four is a simulated pressure. The ‘option’ blitz world can muddy the waters.)