On Tuesday, after almost a full day of negotiation and courting, the Minnesota Vikings signed Za’Darius Smith to a three-year deal worth up to $47 million. The one-time terrorizer of Kirk Cousins will now line up in purple, across from Danielle Hunter. Hunter is now locked into Minnesota for the next two years after the Vikings converted his $18 million roster bonus into a signing bonus. That makes him virtually untradeable, and the duo will actually play for the Vikings (injury notwithstanding). Go ahead, drink that in, get excited.
Smith’s production speaks for itself, even though he lost some time to injury in 2021. If you wanted, you could look at Hunter’s and Smith’s pressure numbers over the last few years, slap them together, and call it a day. But we can go deeper than that. We can examine exactly how Smith would be used in Minnesota, and crucially, how it affects the players around him.
Health
The first thing we should get out of the way is Za’Darius Smith’s back problem. Smith missed a lot of the 2021 season with a bulging disc in his back, which is remarkably similar to the herniated disc Hunter suffered in his neck. I explain more about that sort of injury in this article.
Basically, you have pads in between each of your vertebrae called discs that are filled with a jelly-like substance. If it tears, or herniates, the jelly substance can leak out and irritate nerves. Hunter’s herniated, and it required surgery to clear out the jelly-like substance, but more could leak out if it compresses the wrong way. If it compresses, that jelly can bulge out, hence, a bulging disc. The disc itself can irritate the nerve, causing the same pain.
Smith’s back surgery was likely some sort of microdiscectomy, which is a fancy word for removing the tissue that’s irritating the nerve. He’ll live the rest of his life with the disc bulging, which is perfectly fine (you might have the same condition and not even know it), as long as it doesn’t bulge further and irritate the nerve again.
All of this is to say, there is a small chance of re-injury in Smith’s back, but a lower chance than Hunter’s. However, it’s a good reason to limit their workloads in the offseason program.
But enough about that, let’s get to the fun part: links to clips of Za’Darius Smith destroying worlds.
Run defense
Ed Donatell will run his defense in the style of his mentor, Vic Fangio, in Minnesota. That means a 3-4 base with a lot of more condensed, flattened-out fronts, in an effort to generate one-on-one matchups against guards and centers. That means, very often, a lot of beef in the middle of the defense. It puts a lot of stress on the edge rushers in particular, who are solely responsible for setting the edge. Setting the edge requires a certain physicality, and if you don’t have it, interior production goes to waste.
Smith isn’t really a stand-’em-up edge setter. That would be like going 35 miles per hour in a school zone with a brand new Maserati. It’s destined for bigger and better things. This will take some getting used to — in Mike Zimmer’s scheme, run defense was a bit more reactive and conservative. A stalemate was a win, and you relied on the scheme to funnel the running back into a mess of bodies.
Smith’s game runs counter to that. It’s all about penetration, an aggressive mentality, and setting up one guy to secure the highlight play. That’s not to say Smith can’t stand up an offensive lineman if asked. It’s just that he can so often do more. He can shed that lineman and wreak havoc in the backfield. That’s preferable to simply standing the guy up (though there’s no shame in a stalemate in run defense).
In Green Bay, Smith’s role was fairly unique. He didn’t consistently line up at a particular position like edge rusher or linebacker. Rather, he roved around the formation, reading plays and shooting gaps. It’s a very aggressive role designed specifically for Smith. Fittingly, they called it the “Rover” position. The level of freedom varied from call to call, but Smith had a lot of power to choose a gap and go.
That is very different from the disciplined, suffocating one-gap scheme Zimmer ran, which probably strikes Vikings fans as a welcome thing. With Zimmer, players had a gap. They had to be correct about which gap is whose, and then they had to stay in that gap. Abandon your gap to try and make a play, and the whole thing falls apart. So if the opponent wanted to run away from, say, Danielle Hunter, they could. Hunter can’t leave his gap.
There is still some of that with Donatell. An NFL defense has to have some structure, or it’s just backyard football. But Smith will play some read-and-react ball. Mike Pettine is also in the room and can pull out the same plays he pulled out in Green Bay and hand them to Donatell. In this Film Room episode with Brian Baldinger, he describes the freedom Pettine gave him.
Obviously, it’s up to Donatell if he wants to approach Smith in the same way Pettine did. Pettine’s run defense in Green Bay fell apart before the Packers fired him after the 2020 season. However, Smith thrived.
In Baltimore, Smith’s coaches noticed that he always beat guards when he had a one-on-one. So they started scheming up one-on-ones. This blossomed further in Green Bay, and Smith learned how to generate his own. Pettine even had play calls that relied on Smith freelancing. “Z Green Bay” was a call that meant Smith reads the play and blows it up. No gap assignment, no alignment, just roaming around and wrecking shop.
Smith is still more of an edge rusher than anything else, however. Opponents would be ill-advised to block him with tight ends, which greatly restricts their run game playbook. In perfect harmony with the rest of the Fangio-style defense, Smith can line up in one place, but attack somewhere else. Sometimes these are planned stunts, and sometimes, they’re freelances. But Smith can be trusted to freelance in a way that doesn’t hang the rest of the defense out to dry. That makes running against him incredibly complicated.
Okay, okay, we ate dinner. Now time for dessert. The real reason to bring in Smith is his pass-rushing capability.
Pass Defense
Smith has an uncanny ability to read formations and plays. In this part of the aforementioned film room episode, he details how he knew that the protection was slid away from him. That play is from the 2019 Monday Night matchup against the Vikings where Smith racked up 3.5 sacks and almost singlehandedly dashed the Vikings’ division hopes.
In that year, the Vikings were faking outside zone runs away from superstar edge rushers, then bootlegging the other way. It was a way to try and neutralize their murderer’s row schedule of edge rushers, including Smith. Smith knew about this, so any time he saw a play-action pass from under center, he knew he’d have a one-on-one matchup and a quarterback rolling toward him. And you never want to give Za’Darius a clean one-on-one.
On a different occasion, he knew that a center tapping himself on the head signaled a change to a “5-0” protection, or a man-to-man protection with all five linemen one-on-one. He drew that protection by wandering around pre-snap, disguising his actual alignment. The center can’t discern the right call, so he has to call the versatile 5-0. Since that guarantees Smith a one-on-one with no help, he knew he had room to work against that center.
This is where Smith’s value really comes through. He is incredible at winning one-on-one matchups. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of all the different mistakes offensive linemen make, and how to punish them. If the tackle stops his feet, Smith is turning the corner. If he gives up his chest, Smith is attacking with a bull rush. To beat Smith, you have to be perfect in your technique or one step ahead of him at all times.
The result is an absolute ton of penetration all the time. Smith lives in your backfield, and there is nothing you can do about it without leaving Dalvin Tomlinson, Harrison Phillips, and (horrifyingly) Hunter one-on-one. The Vikings might see a lot more six- and seven-man protections just so they have enough bodies to deal with all of Minnesota’s potential threats. And that’s just when they’re rushing four.
In his introductory press conference, Smith looked forward to watching tape on future opponents, picking the weakest link, and going against that guy one-on-one. That’s the best way to describe his likely job — the guy you set up matchups for. In Denver, Vic Fangio didn’t love to blitz, except in pass-only situations like 3rd and long. We’ll see if Donatell deploys the same strategy, but the addition of Za’Darius Smith makes it possible to get pressure with just four pass-rushers. That will go a long way toward aiding a secondary that is currently little more than a pile of rubble after the failure of Zimmer’s defense.
