EAGAN — Coming out of the two-minute warning, the Jacksonville Jaguars were in position to pull off a stunning upset against the Minnesota Vikings.
Down 12-7, the Jags caught a break on a facemask penalty and had the ball on the Minnesota 43-yard line. Backup QB Mac Jones dropped back, looked downfield and thought he had a man deep. What he didn’t realize is that linebacker Blake Cashman was just about to hit him. Jones got smacked by the linebacker as he threw and let the ball fly 10 yards over the intended receiver for an interception. Game over, Vikings advance to 7-2.
Upon further review, Cashman was running a stunt with pass rusher Jonathan Greenard. The linebacker went outside and hit the offensive tackle to give Greenard space to beat the guard. Cashman kept his balance and still reached the quarterback.
Head coach Kevin O’Connell broke down Cashman’s pass rush on Wednesday.
“I showed it to the team….taking in the explosiveness and just the efficiency of the way the two of those guys work together,” O’Connell said. “Essentially Blake ricocheting free and then JG ending up one-on-one on the back the way it worked out. Really good just scheme, but also these explosive players and showing that play style. And that’s all it really is, how fast can you play yet still be under control and be where you’re supposed to be when you need to be there and then violently show up at the tackle points, make the plays when they’re there to be made. That’s everything Cash has been.”
That and more. With Cashman back in the lineup, the Jaguars gained just 143 yards and scored seven points against the Vikings defense. Complete domination. That’s not a coincidence. The former Minnesota Gopher has become the head of the snake in Brian Flores’s defense. Without Cashman, the Vikings moved second-year linebacker Ivan Pace Jr. into his “green dot” play caller position and had to use multiple players to make up the difference, sometimes bringing veteran Kamu Grugier-Hill off the bench, sometimes using Josh Metellus as a pure linebacker, sometimes shifting outside linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel to the middle. It wasn’t the same.
“I think having [Cashman] back in there was just a charge of life,” O’Connell said. “You see it come into fruition where maybe guys aren’t being stretched or stressed outside of their real roles…you can get kind of that sweet spot of guys doing the things within the defense.”
Not that there are many linebackers who are equipped to handle the mental load that Cashman takes on in Flores’s defense but what makes him exceptional in a world of finesse linebackers is the aggressiveness and physicality that he’s able to combine with quickness to make him a very difficult matchup for offenses.
“You’ve got like this athletic, kind of explosive athlete, run and hit kind of linebacker, but then there’s instincts in the pass game, he always seems to be – when he’s an underneath cover player he always seems to be in the windows and just making things murky for the quarterback,” O’Connell said.
When you put it all together, Cashman is a top 10 linebacker in the NFL by PFF. He’s graded top 20 in every category: Tackling, run defense, pass rush and coverage.
Last year with the Houston Texans, Cashman also graded extremely well but wasn’t used as much as a pass rusher. He chased the passer only 47 times on 746 total snaps. He’s already cleared that (59) on 368 snaps under Flores.
“I knew with Flo’s scheme that a linebacker would be required to blitz a lot and pass rush but I wasn’t totally sure how they would want to use guys,” Cashman said. “As soon as I got here, I quickly found out that it doesn’t matter where you line up on the field or what your position is you have to be able to do it all because Flo likes to have a variety of players doing a variety of different things.”
The 28-year-old linebacker explained what goes into blitzing from his position in a complex scheme.
“For me it’s understanding what we’re trying to do,” Cashman said. “We run a lot of [simulated] pressures where we are bringing pressure from one side and dropping guys that are on the line of scrimmage on the other side. I listen to our coaches, listen to the D-line since that’s their world with blocking schemes and understanding how to attack specific players… trying to take advantage of areas that we can exploit. That’s all these different stunts that we practice. We have been able to hit those in games but we have to continue to mix it up to keep offenses honest and make us unpredictable.”
Against the Jaguars, the Vikings noticed that the offensive line was having trouble understanding where the pressure was coming from and struggling mightily to pick it up. So the Vikings kept bringing the heat. Cashman had two pressures, one of which was a sack, Metellus added two and Pace Jr. also picked up a sack.
“I call it ‘organized chaos,’” Cashman said. “That’s my favorite part of this defense. You get lined up and the offense knows there is a blitz coming but they don’t know what side of the field it’s coming from, who’s the player going to be. You can see the stress in their eyes. That’s my favorite part. When you can cause an offense to be frustrated and hesitant on their play calling or their reads, it allows us to eat and make plays.”
To understand why offenses have such a tough time dealing with Cashman in particular, I asked center Garrett Bradbury to explain.
“He has command of the defense, which you can see if someone does or doesn’t,” Bradbury said. “He’s physical, he’s fast. If you check those two boxes at linebacker you’re going to be a problem. Offenses have to choose how they’re going to set up their protections because they’ll have five [linemen] in there and they’ll scheme it up to where Cash is on a running back and he’s blowing through running backs. You have to pick your poison.”
What’s rare about Cashman, who is listed at 237 pounds, doesn’t just blow through running backs. He causes issues for offensive linemen too, which Bradbury said can catch linemen by surprise.
“As an O-lineman you’d rather have a linebacker on you than a D-linemen so sometimes guys might think, ‘Oh, I can shoot my hands and it will be over.’ You have a linebacker who brings it like he does, it’s like, ‘whoa, this is not a play off.’ That will surprise you when a smaller body decides to try to run through you,” Bradbury said.
The Vikings need Cashman to keep running through people. The next two opponents rank seventh and first in percentage of drop-backs that turn into sacks. That should serve as an opportunity for the veteran linebacker to put the gas pedal down. He should be fresh to do so. Because the defense was so dominant with him back in the lineup, Cashman only had to play 35 snaps last week.
“I think Cash [Blake Cashman] told me at one point he felt like he hadn’t even broke a sweat and I said, ‘Well that’s a really good thing cause you’re playing really well so I’d prefer that this keeps going,’” O’Connell said.