NFL Playoffs: The Dallas Cowboys have developed a one-man answer to NFL offenses

Micah Parsons tried it out in practice. He might’ve actually done it in a game if the pandemic hadn’t up-ended the 2020 season. He still wants to do it someway even though he now stars for the Dallas Cowboys.

“We’ll get there one day,” Parsons says.

The notion that Parsons could moonlight as a kick returner is also what makes him a unicorn. He’s only called a linebacker because players need some position listed next to their names. In reality, he plays practically every position on defence. And that is what makes him a weapon unlike any other for the Cowboys.

When Dallas plays the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the wildcard round of the playoffs on Monday night, Parsons is the guy who will drive Tom Brady crazy. From the moment Parsons became a Cowboy, the team’s defence went from being one of the worst in the league to one of the best because he’s not simply a menace who racks up sacks and game-changing plays. He’s capable of terrorising offences in the same exact way that they have grown accustomed to tormenting defences.

Cutting edge offensive schemes in the NFL weaponize versatility. The ability of players to line up anywhere on the field forces defences to account for numerous possibilities when a quarterback breaks the huddle. When a wide receiver can capably line up in the backfield, or a running back at receiver, defenders have only seconds to adjust.

Parsons’s capacity to play all over doesn’t just neutralise that advantage. It also flips the equation. When teams play the Cowboys, it’s the offence that has to scramble to adjust based on wherever Parsons positions himself before the snap.

“It creates frustration for the linemen,” Parsons says. “They don’t know where to go. It just creates a bunch of mismatch nightmares to our advantage.”

Parsons was somewhat of a mystery heading into the 2021 NFL draft. He was one of the players who sat out the 2020 college football season because of the pandemic, which meant teams had one less year of tape on him. There were also questions about how missing a year could affect his development.

It was also clear there wasn’t any other player available quite like him. Standing at 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds, he ran the 40-yard dash in 4.39 seconds at his pro day. That would have been tied for the sixth fastest time among wide receivers for 2021 draft prospects.

In college, Parsons showed flashes of being able to rush the passer like a defensive lineman. He had the build of a linebacker. He had the speed of a defensive back. The question for the teams that considered drafting him: How exactly would they deploy him?

When Dallas picked him 12th overall, it had an answer: Everywhere.

The Cowboys’ selection of Parsons also coincided with Dan Quinn’s first season as the team’s defensive co-ordinator, and Parsons’s physical traits were obvious to him. But what impressed Quinn even more was how quickly Parsons absorbed all the information thrown at him.

It can take rookies years to grasp the nuances of NFL playbooks, and that is just when they have to learn one role. Parsons had to learn several. The hardest part, though, wasn’t his ability to do that. It was finding time to get him into all the different position meetings that were taking place at the same time.

“We just map it out to go to different spots,” Quinn says. “It’s a challenge.”

The Cowboys discovered something else others missed about Parsons. He was a better pass rusher than anyone imagined.

In Parsons’s two seasons at Penn State, he had a total of 6.5 sacks. Many pre-draft scouting reports suggested that he might wind up as a middle linebacker, or some other position that doesn’t play a primary role in attacking the quarterback.

But Quinn thought Parsons’s combination of size and quickness could be dangerous as an edge rusher. He was right. Parsons tallied 13 sacks last year, along with 20 tackles for a loss and 30 quarterback hits. He was runner-up for NFL defensive player of the year—as a rookie.

He didn’t experience a sophomore slump this season. He added 13.5 sacks and may win defensive player of the year.

What’s most incredible about his numbers, which put him among the league’s top sack maestros, is that pass rushing is only a part-time job for him on the field. One analysis showed he played even more often as an off-ball linebacker than he did on the edge last season. There were even times he lined up at cornerback and safety.

That flexibility means that on any given play he can be doing practically anything. His talents are perfectly suited for guarding pass-catching tight ends. He’s also speedy enough to keep up with receivers when he has to, and he’s big enough to take down running backs barrelling toward him.

That made Parsons the integral piece to turning around the Dallas defence. In 2020, the Cowboys ranked 28th in the league in points allowed. Last year, they ranked second, and they were in the top five again this season.

“You just put the tape on and 11 shows up everywhere,” Buccaneers offensive co-ordinator Byron Leftwich said this week, using Parsons’s uniform number. “He’s a great football player, really one of the great football players in this league. We’ll have that challenge.”

Parsons is a problem Leftwich hasn’t exactly solved yet. Even though the Buccaneers beat the Cowboys 19-3 when they met during the first week of this regular season, Tampa Bay’s offence sputtered at times and Brady was sacked twice—both times by Parsons.

The stakes are even bigger on Monday night. It’s the playoffs. And Micah Parsons could end Tom Brady’s career.

-The Wall Street Journal