NFL Big Boys Are Back in Style

Teams are starting to prioritize bigger and stronger players once again as the league evolves towards the run game once more

Apr 04, 2024

Deone Bucannon quietly retired into the night after Super Bowl LV. The seven-year veteran played 14 special teams snaps in a game his Tampa Bay Buccaneers dominated from start to finish. He walked off the field for the final time, concluding an NFL career that, while not esteemed among fans, defined the NFL for the latter half of the 2010s.

Wait what?

Bucannon, a player whose only honors as an NFL player was a PFWA all-rookie team and winning a ring while riding the Bucs’ bench, changed the NFL? If you are unfamiliar with the linebacker, it might sound like nonsense.

But the defender, picked by the Arizona Cardinals in the final stages of the 2014 first round, started a revolution in the NFL. Teams from all around the league suddenly were looking for a “Deone Bucannon-type” player in the draft every year. Players such as Keanu Neal, Kyzir White and Su’a Cravens rode his coattails to success.

Bucannon was drafted as a safety, but played best in the box, stuffing the run and covering running backs and tight ends as a weak side linebacker. While a box safety already existed, with players such as Kam Chancellor dominating at the position, the Cardinals were doing something different.

Chancellor was a safety who would sneak into the box on nickel packages. Bucannon was a full-time middle 3-4 linebacker at 210 lbs. A player who may have been a touch too small, but the trade off of having extra speed on the field was worth it in the Cardinals defense. Bucannon was a strong tackler and an extremely physical player, of course, but like anyone else his size, could easily get run over by a pulling guard. By having him on the field instead of a normal linebacker, someone around 40 pounds heavier, the Cardinals were worse against the run and better against the pass.

It was a revelation. Bucannon’s name quickly circulated in the league as someone doing something special. NFL teams were throwing the ball around more than ever in the early 2010s, and it seemed like every division had two absolute gunslingers with Hall of Fame potential. A revolution was happening on the offensive side of the ball, and defenses needed answers. The Cardinals, with what they did with Bucannon, gave defensive coordinators around the league an answer.

A new position was born, the moneyback.

"God gave me this ability to play in the box and also cover people," Bucannon told Cardinals media ahead of the 2016 season. "Now there are a bunch of guys in the draft that could do the same thing as well.”

And a bunch of guys started to show up. Defenses got smaller and faster. The game became more like seven-on-seven, with guys throwing around the ball more than years before. By the final years of the decade, and early years of 2020, running backs and interior linemen fell almost entirely out of favor around the league. On the other side, typical middle linebackers and defensive tackles did too. They were being drafted later and paid less in free agency. It was a new era.

A massive victory for this defensive revolution came in the 2018 Wild Card round, when Lamar Jackson’s Baltimore Ravens had no answer for the Los Angeles Chargers defense. The west coast team that had most embraced this newer, smaller, era of football had just showed up the young upstart quarterback on his home turf.

Bucannon’s career was already winding down by that point. He had fallen out of favor in a new Cardinals defensive scheme and it was clear his body was being broken down by performing the physical demands of a linebacker with the size of a cornerback.

His legacy would live on, though. Faster, more athletic, coverage-focused linebackers would keep getting drafted high and getting huge contracts. What the Cardinals did with Bucannon helped usher in a new era of football.

An era that now may be coming to an end.

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In the pre-Bucannon days, defensive tackles were not expected to be game changing pass rushers. It was an added bonus, of course, if your 3-tech could rush inside, but their main goal was to hold ground and clog the run. Make a mess in the middle against the pass and push the quarterback backwards enough in the pocket for the edge rushers to attack from outside.

And then came Aaron Donald. When the future Hall of Famer came out of Pittsburgh in 2016, he was technically undersized for his position. It did not seem to matter at all. Donald was a game wrecker. An incredible interior pass rusher that could deal with the constant double teams defensive tackles face. Like Bucannon, there was a trade off against the run, but he was so good against the pass that it didn’t matter.

While Donald was truly one of the kind — even today’s most pass-rush-abled defensive tackles are much bigger than his 280 lb frame — he showed NFL coaches something new. Your best pass rusher could be someone from the inside.

In 2018, the Kansas City Chiefs moved young pass rushing defensive end Chris Jones inside more often, and he erupted into stardom. As the years went on, pass rushing became more important than ever. Defensive tackles followed linebackers in getting smaller, shiftier and more agile. The name of the game was containment, force quarterbacks into quicker, shorter, passes and rally to tackle.

West coast offenses thrived while vertical offenses took a step back. The Michael Thomases and Jarvis Landrys of the world emerged as stars. The best way to win football games was to replace the run game with short passes. All of your skill players needed to be able to lineup anywhere — your running backs and tight ends needed to be receivers and your wide receiver needed to run routes out of the backfield. Tight ends with little interest in their duties as a blocker, such as Travis Kelce, began to emerge. You spread teams out, and exploited the gaps they left inside.

But the NFL is cyclical. As offenses got faster, defenses were just a step behind them, getting smaller to keep up. But for a brief moment, it seemed like we forgot why the big boys reigned supreme for so long in the NFL.

One team that didn’t forget was the New England Patriots. The Chargers, a week after defeating Jackson’s Ravens, traveled to Foxborough to take of the NFL’s incumbent dynasty. They were smashed. Los Angeles was just too small to deal with the Patriots on that day. Sony Michel scored three touchdowns and the Patriots ran for more than 150 yards in a blowout. It was 35-0 at halftime. There was nothing the Chargers could do on that day, they had lost this football game 10 months earlier, when they chose to build themselves this way in the offseason.

New England would go onto win the Super Bowl, defeating the Los Angeles Rams — which was itself one of these modern, smaller, and faster teams that were dominated the league at the time — after shutting down its high flying offense.

The seven-on-seven days of the NFL peaked in 2020, when it felt like every big team had a dynamic QB-WR duo. Patrick Mahomes and Tyreek Hill, Tom Brady and Mike Evans, Josh Allen and Stefon Diggs, Kyler Murray and DeAndre Hopkins, Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams. Everywhere you looked another one of these duos was emerging.

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The free agent guard market was hotter than it has been for a very long time this year. Kevin Dotson chose to stay with the Rams after they signed him to a 3-year, $48 million deal. Jonah Jackson, formerly of the Detroit Lions, chose to join him on a 3-year, $51 million deal.

Robert Hunt got a super deal to leave the Miami Dolphins for the Carolina Panthers, inking a 5 year, $100 million deal, to take his talents to Charlotte.

Defensive tackles got paid too, and not just the top tier pass rushers at the position such as Justin Madubuike and Chris Jones. Christian Wilkins, the stalwart defensive tackle who spent the first five years of his career with the Dolphins, inked a $110 million deal with the Las Vegas Raiders. Dexter Lawrence signed a 4 year, $90 million deal to stay with the New York Giants. The latter two are both players with limited pass rushing capabilities, but exceptionally great against the run. They are, basically, defensive tackles from the 2000s.

Winning in the trenches has always been important in football, but it seemed like we got away from that for a few years. But 2023 saw the rise of run heavy teams erupting into success, and it seems like the tides are shifting.

The NFL’s leading rusher and Offensive Player of the Year in 2023 was Christian McCaffery, who led the San Francisco 49ers to the NFC’s top seed. The NFL’s MVP was Lamar Jackson, who led the Ravens rushing attack to the top seed in the AFC. Teams like the Detroit Lions — widely panned for drafting a running back in the first round — and Rams made the playoffs off of the back of strong rushing attacks. The Dolphins dynamic duo or Raheem Mostert and rookie De’Von Achane carried the offense to incredible heights, dropping 70 points on the Denver Broncos in an early season game.

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