Washington Football Team grades for the 2021 defense

Washington Football Team defensive line

This was the biggest strength of the Washington Football Team heading into the season. For a lot of great reasons too.

The duo of Chase Young and Montez Sweat has to be considered one of the more exciting young tandems in football. Jonathan Allen is a star, so is Da’Ron Payne. Matthew Ioannidis impacts the game heavily, and Tim Settle would start on a lot of teams.

That’s an insane amount of depth on the line. The issue is, Young struggled to start the year. Once he started to show up more, he got hurt. It wasn’t great though and he’ll hold on to a C- grade. Sweat was playing great, then missed a ton of time due to injuries and COVID. Still, he made a lot of big plays and gets a B grade.

Payne was really solid all year (B+ grade), and Ioannidis didn’t put up the numbers but played well (C+ grade). Settle was mainly just reserves (C grade). It was Jonathan Allen that was the star. The defensive tackle was always known as more of a run stopper – and that’s still something he’s phenomenal at. In 2021 though, he upped his pass-rushing game.

Allen finished with a career-high nine sacks. He added 62 tackles (10 for loss) and had an insane 30 QB hits (literally doubling his previous high of 15). Allen helped keep the line together all year long no matter who was in the rotation. He gets an A+ himself.

Talking reserves, James Smith-Williams stands out as the best of that group. He did manage 2.5 sacks and had some nice plays. He earned a B grade. Casey Toohill and Shaka Toney both had a few moments, and Will Bradley-King was involved in some plays. No one really played enough to get a grade though.

That means we move on to the overall grade. They definitely didn’t live up to the insane hype. To be fair though, it was going to be really really hard for them to do that.

Young was a major disappointment. But it did feel like that injury came right when he was starting to get going. I’m not worried about him, but 2021 was bad. Sweat was good, but not great. Payne was great, Allen was elite. Everyone else was kind of just there.

In the end, they did finish eighth in the league when it came to stopping the run (104.4 rushing yards allowed per game). And that’s with playing the Philadelphia Eagles twice.

They weren’t bringing a lot of pressure to the quarterbacks though. The 38 sacks they had put them in the middle of the pack. And that definitely didn’t help a secondary that struggled.

Overall, the defensive line was still the best part of the Washington defense though. Good run-stopping and decent against the pass. That all holds up to give them a final grade of “B” in 2021.