The lone lion: Why Micah Parsons is the NFL’s best defensive player
You can wrap up any voting for the NFL’s 2021 Defensive Rookie of the Year, because Cowboys edge-demolisher and off-ball specialist Micah Parsons has that on lock. We’re past asking whether the Penn State alum is the league’s best defensive rookie. We are now asking whether Parsons has become the NFL’s best and most impactful defensive player, regardless of position or experience.
There is a legitimate case to be made, especially in the second half of the season. Since Week 9, Parsons leads the league in sacks (7.5), total pressures (26), and stops (20), and he’s done it at multiple positions. Per Pro Football Focus, Parsons has played 304 snaps this season on the defensive line, 360 in the box as an off-ball linebacker, 13 in the slot, six at outside cornerback (!), and one at free safety. There isn’t much Parsons can’t do, and what he can do, he’s doing at levels we have no right to expect from a rookie. There are very few players who can dominate at two levels of a defense at any given time, and Parsons has been doing it all season.
The NFL’s November Defensive Rookie of the Month came into his first December game, a Thursday-nighter against the Saints, with apparently more to prove. He’d come off a one-sack, 10-pressure, five-stop performance against the Raiders on Thanksgiving night that showed him as virtually unstoppable against Derek Carr and company, but his game against New Orleans may have been even more impressive. Parsons had another sack, five pressures, two stops, and no catches allowed on two targets.
“I feel like the more the season went on, you could see his speed start coming alive in the games,” end DeMarcus Lawrence recently said. “He’s a fast player, excellent instincts, he’s a go-getter. He’s the lone lion.”
Perhaps most interesting is how defensive coordinator Dan Quinn can deploy Parsons from week to week. Against the Raiders, Parsons lined up 73 times on the line, and four times in the box. Against the Saints, it was 12 snaps on the line, 50 in the box, and three in the slot. You don’t expect a 6-foot-3, 245-pound guy to make impact plays in the slot, either… but as we will see, Micah Parsons is no ordinary dude. For a rookie to excel in this many roles is… well, let’s just say it’s somewhere between exceedingly rare and completely unprecedented.
Parsons is a stone killer off the edge.
(AP Photo/Ron Jenkins)
The Raiders decided to give Parsons a lot of one-on-ones with right tackle Brandon Parker. No offense to Mr. Parker, but this was Not A Good Idea. This was nightmare fuel for the fourth-year man from North Carolina A&T (HBCU shout-out), who has played pretty well this season, but allowed a sack, three quarterback hits, and three quarterback hurries in this game.
Parsons can beat you all kinds of ways off the edge. The sack Parker allowed came off a straight bull-rush, in which Parsons just leveled Parker from the point of attack. Parker is a 6-foot-8, 320-pound behemoth, but when you get this kind of leverage, that tends not to matter. From there, it’s just speed-to-power to the quarterback.
And on this pressure of Carr which forced an incomplete pass to running back Josh Jacobs, Parsons replicated the old Von Miller move — fake the bull-rush inside, then dip outside and around. The sheer quickness and body control required to navigate this to success is pretty mind-boggling.
Parsons was an equal-opportunity disruptor against Las Vegas’ tackles. On this pressure of Carr in which the quarterback just had to heave the ball anywhere to avoid a sack, Parsons got left tackle Kolton Miller all out of sorts with a dynamite inside move. Parsons’ inside counter is one of his more impressive and reliable gambits.
Parsons in space means you can't run boot to his side.
(AP Photo/Derick Hingle)
If Parsons isn’t able to get to the quarterback in the pocket because said quarterback is rolling with boot-action or straight bootleg, that’s just fine with him. Though eventually, quarterbacks will learn that this guy is too quick and violent in space to run any kind of boot to his side of the field. A check to the other side will be a necessity. Saints quarterback Taysom Hill discovered this with a quickness…
…as did the aforementioned Mr. Carr.
“Any time you’re backed up and you have a chance to get off the field, somebody’s got to make the play,” Parsons said of the Hill sack. “Why not me?”
Why not, indeed?
Parsons can also disrupt from the interior.
(Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports)
If you want absolute evidence of Parsons’ ability to turn speed to power, look no further than his reps as an inside pass-rusher, where he displays a truly obnoxious knack for devastating guard and double teams. Here, he had Parker and right guard Alex Leatherwood doubling up on him, and he still broke through to force Carr out of the pocket. This is a good time to remind you that Parsons is 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds. He’s not a hybrid inside guy swinging 290 pounds around. But he’s able to bring the power you’d expect from someone 50 pounds heavier.
Coverage is Parsons' force-multiplier trait.
(Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports)
Perhaps the most impressive play Parsons had against the Saints was the one that led to safety Jayron Kearse’s tip-drill interception of a Taysom Hill deep pass to Kenny Stills. The play deserved its own article at the time, which happened.
Basically, you have an off-ball linebacker moving to the slot to cover a receiver in Stills who ran a 4.38 40-yard dash at his 2013 combine, and still brings speed to the table as a slot target. No worries for Parsons, who actually lost a step to Stills up the chute, and somehow recovered to catch up, deflect the pass, and force the pick.
The end-zone angle shows more specifically how special this play is.
“Micah ran with the guy, the ball came off his hands, and I looked the ball off his hands,” Kearse said after the game. “The rest is history. I can’t really explain it.”
Neither can we. All we can do is stand in amazement.
Stopping the run? No problem.
(Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports)
It says a lot about Parsons’ ridiculous skills as a pass-rusher and coverage defender that we haven’t gotten to how well he plays as an off-ball linebacker against the run. On this handoff to Ty Montgomery, the Saints were well aware of it. This is something you don’t see every day — a double-team to the second level of the defense. Receiver Lil’Jordan Humphrey and center Erik McCoy went quickly to try and close Parsons off from stopping this rushing attempt. Parsons paid no attention to Humphrey on the chip, and just shoved the 6-foot-4, 303-pound McCoy (one of the best centers in the league) out of the way as if he were a proverbial sack of potatoes.
Pasrons' do-it-all excellence deserves serious notice.
(Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports)
“When we drafted him, seriously, we made a big emphasis [of], ‘Guys, now, I don’t want to draft an inside linebacker here. Are we drafting a pressure player and can he pressure from the outside?'” Cowboys owner/general manager Jerry Jones said in November. “The answer was a resounding ‘yes’ across the room. Resounding.”
Whether the Cowboys knew that they were getting the ultimate distillation of the ideal do-it-all defender can be debated. What can’t be debated is that Parsons has become That Guy. Consider that than the Cardinals selected Clemson defender Isaiah Simmons with the eighth overall pick in the 2020 draft, they tried to make him as versatile as he was in college, and it took a while for that to work out. That’s not to diminish Simmons’ athletic potential; it’s more to say that NFL offenses are inexorably more complex than their NCAA versions, and it generally takes a while for any defensive player to master one position at the next level, never mind multiple roles.
That Parsons has taken so quickly to so many things at the highest level of football makes him not only the most impressive rookie on his side of the ball, but quite possibly the most impactful defensive player in the NFL right now.
It sounds like hyperbole until you watch the tape. Then, it makes all the sense in the world.
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