Brenton Cox Jr. is the lone bright spot up front this week

Despite a porous day in the pass rush department, Cox continues to stake a claim to more snaps

There’s no way around it, after two weeks of beating up on two of the worst offensive lines in the NFL, the Packers’ front got punk’d on Sunday. Despite posting a perfectly adequate pressure rate of 36.4%, per NFL Next Gen Stats, the team only managed to get Sam Darnold on the ground once. Sacks can be noisy game-to-game, but digging deeper into the data shows the real problem from this game: a general lack of quick pressures. Green Bay had the third-slowest time-to-pressure in the league this past week, meaning that Darnold had time to wait for routes to develop downfield. With the Packers dealing with injuries across the defensive backfield, and the linebacking corps, outside of Edgerrin Cooper, being one of the league’s worst in coverage, that combination spells disaster.

The Packers are caught between a rock and a hard place right now with this problem, which is by no means new. The Packers can’t cover the middle of the field to save their lives. Teams are routinely hitting basics, digs, crossers, anything in-breaking behind the hook zones. The way defenses are supposed to defend this is via pass rush. It takes some time for receivers to get 12-15 yards downfield and then break into the windows over the second-level defenders. If you can pressure the quarterback quickly, you can take those throws off the table. This is the entire formula for the legion of boom Seahawks. The problem for Green Bay is that they don’t have the second-level coverage players to cover up for what has been a disappointing front four.

Despite the overall disappointment, second-year defensive end Brenton Cox Jr has been a bright spot. Even against the Vikings, PFF charted him with four total pressures. PFF has Cox with the best pass rush win rate of any of the Packers defensive linemen at 17%, leading Rashan Gary by overall four percentage points, and leading current starter Kingsley Enagbare by ten percentage points. NFL Next Gen Stats’ QBP% has Cox at 13.7%, narrowly ahead of Gary at 13.2%, but materially ahead of Enagbare at 9.1%. The big difference between Cox and everyone else shows up in how quickly his pressures are occurring. Cox’s time-to-pressure leads the team at just 2.65 seconds, a full two-tenths better than any of his other defensive end teammates. Amongst edge rushers in the entire league, that time-to-pressure ranks in the top ten.

What is also encouraging is that Cox has managed this without being a major liability in run defense. His run defense stop rate is higher than both Lukas Van Ness and Enagbare, albeit in dramatically fewer snaps. His aggressive play style shows up in the run game as well where his average depth of tackle is the second shortest on the defense at just one yard downfield.

Everything with Cox must be taken with a grain of salt right now. His snap counts are not very high, and he’s a player that opponents don’t have much film on. But given he looked destined for a second “redshirt” year, his production so far has been a bright spot. It would not be surprising to see his role continue to increase as we move into the playoffs and the team has to prioritize pass rush to try and cover for their weak second-level pass defense. The Packers don’t just need pressure, they need it quickly, and only Rashan Gary is providing pressures at a similar rate to Cox in the Packers defensive end room.