Zach Wilson’s NFL career starts with a tough first test: The Carolina Panthers defense
“It was strange; the defense we played was a different alignment than most teams you’re going to see in the league. A lot of dime personnel, a lot of 3-3-5-kind of sets of weird fronts and just really making it hard on your run game.”
Those were the words of Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, one of Zach Wilson’s role models. Appearing on The Pat McAfee Show, that’s how Rogers chose to describe the Carolina Panthers’ defense after he found himself sacked five times in a tough Week 15 outing last December.
Despite winning the game, Rodgers arguably had the most subpar performance of his MVP season, completing 20 of 29 passes for 143 yards and a touchdown.
The reasons for the performance are well described in one of Rodgers’ postgame quotes: “The Panthers defense is confusing; they rotate a lot and do things that are not normal in the NFL.”
Despite playing the majority of their snaps in a Jets familiar scheme (Cover 3), per Matt Bowen, below, Carolina’s defense is far from vanilla and won’t be anywhere similar to what Wilson has seen in practice.
Showing five deep pre-snap, for example, is something that’s seldom seen anywhere in the NFL, besides Carolina (so is having 3-3-5 as base personnel).
It’s safe to say, then, that Wilson’s first real test will be, at least, a complex one. While it’s hard to predict the degree of difficulty the Panthers defense is going to present Wilson and company, 2020’s tape is critical to understanding the core principles of Carolina’s defensive coordinator Phil Snow, who enters his second year in the role.
After watching the entire game vs. the Packers, I separated my breakdown into two areas:
The initial drive of the game, when the Packers countered the Panthers’ aggressiveness and exotic pre-snap looks with quick screens and hard-nosed rushing.
After that, I broke down the five times Rodgers was sacked and how the Panthers’ defense managed to do it.
The point is pretty simple and obvious here: The Jets must avoid obvious passing situations as much as they can on Sunday.
How Zach Wilson can beat a tough Panthers defense | NY Jets Film