The Bucs defensive line fails to get pressure despite high blitz percentage

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive unit is known for how often it blitzes — it just doesn’t really get to the backfield all that much.

Data analyist Brad Congelio put together a chart showcasing how often a team blitzes and how often those teams get pressures on the quarterback as a result of that. The Bucs are among the higher-blitzing teams in the league, doing so on around 35% of their snaps, but they only get pressures just over 20% of the time. That’s in the bottom quadrant of the graph, which isn’t a great place to be for a football team.

Tampa Bay’s stats when it comes to the pass rush back up these advanced analytics. The Bucs have 21 total sacks on the year, but six of those came during the team’s matchup with the Chicago Bears in Week 2. The team’s sack leader is Vita Vea with just 3.5, and according to Team Rankings, Tampa Bay is 21st in the league in quarterback sack percentage. Simply put, with the rate that the team is blitzing, there should be more pressure — instead, it isn’t coming.

When asked about this problem, head coach Todd Bowles didn’t seem to think that it was a personnel issue.

“Some of them are disrupting the quarterback. Sometimes the ball comes out and it’s just your luck – when you beat a guy and the ball comes out,” Bowles said. “We can rush the passer better. It’s not so much the sacks I’m worried about, as it is the quarterback disruption. We can all be better. We needed to be better last game, we can be better this week.”

The Bucs are set to face off against the Tennessee Titans on Sunday. Per Team Rankings, the Titans have given up sacks on 11.07% of their plays so far this year, good for 30th in the league. If Tampa Bay can’t rack up sacks then, it’s going to be hard for it to do it for the rest of the year.

Story originally appeared on Buccaneers Wire