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Jim Harbaugh has been making it well known that he sees a consummate professional in Scott Matlock, he has taken the time to bring up his team first mentality and hard working attitude when no one asked any questions that could have led him to that answer. People who have been around football long enough know that when this kind of soap box praise is made about a down-the-depth-chart young player it’s usually because they’ve stood out in practise in all the right ways. 

Now, Harbaugh could of course be holding his attitude up as a shining example to send a message to his veteran players however that’s the type of move you do when you either don’t have the respect of your players or if preseason isn’t going the way you wanted it to go. By all accounts neither of those things are happening right now so I decided to jump into last season’s tape to see whether or not there were signs that Matlock was really ready to take a leap from rotational defensive line depth to a player worthy of regular press conference mentions.

I have done quite a few rookie reviews for various publications and if there’s one thing I have learnt it’s that whilst there is merit in going from the start and watching the player’s growth week by week, by Week 18 (even if you had the time to watch 500+ snaps) you’ll have player trait exhaustion. This is where you’ve seen too much of their film and your mind starts to assume you know what it’s going to see and you’ll start to naturally refer back to their early season work instead of focusing on the finer details. Through experience I have learnt to start from the end and work back to see if there was a noticeable difference as you go backwards and, at the same time, focus on the peak of their development to understand how they might progress going forwards.

The games I watched in full were

• Week 18 – vs Kansas City Chiefs
• Week 17 – vs Denver Broncos
• Week 16 – vs Las Vegas Raiders
• Week 8 – vs Chicago Bears
• Week 6 – vs Dallas Cowboys

Overall there is one overriding takeaway I kept coming back to; despite his many failures on draft night, Tom Telesco might have found a real contributor in the 6th round in Matlock. Scott was not only on the field early into his rookie season but he grew consistently to a relatively accomplished azimuth at the end of his first year. The first thing that shows up on his tape is his ability to anchor against double teams. Playing somewhere between an even front 4i and a 1t means that at some point you will have to face double teams and how you deal with those will determine how often you get on the field, Matlock showed he had plenty of lower body strength as well as the mental resilience to play either the nose in Staley’s even front looks or either end in his odd fronts.

From each of these positions he sets up well keeping his feet underneath and behind meaning he had his full body strength to take to his blockers from the snap. The angle of his back is usually textbook and he does well to generate an efficient push from his lower half with no wasted energy from this body position. The only shame is that he could have used this to be more aggressive more often, his balance prohibited him from doing so but we’ll get onto that later. I was consistently impressed by just how well he stood up to heavier centers and guards as he is a lighter interior defensive lineman who plays just under 300 lbs. He may have lacked the body weight to play a true 0 technique in the odd looks but other than that the coaches were clearly comfortable putting him anywhere along the line as he could absorb blocking concepts on run plays targeted at his gap.

Watch the clips and observe how he both stood his ground and kept his gap integrity. It’s easy for gap shooters to roll off blocks against the grain and try to work around the backside but to survive the initial push, make his shoulders narrow and squeeze the gap is a big plus. He puts the front in a position to be gap sound as not only does he occupy his own gap soundly but he prevents the offensive lineman from climbing to the next level with a free release meaning his linebackers can step down to their gaps (not that they always did this). I’m a fan of how he fights to maintain leverage integrity and he shows this best when playing a gap and a half as the below video shows. He successfully peaks and then squeezes to shut down interior rushing lanes, he did this more often than his positional colleagues and I was surprised that he was still being out-snapped by others towards the end of the season when he really started to show this on a consistent basis.

There were a few moments where his elite level 9.68 RAS score athleticism showed itself and he put everything together to make truly impactful plays in big moments. The best of these came in the redzone where he seems to have the ability to turn the dial up a notch to make big time stops. Harbaugh spoke to his mentality of being a leader and there is no better way to assert that than showing up in the big moments, he found ways to do that in got to have it situations over the last two weeks of the season. The short lived Giff Smith era may have been winless but the defense didn’t play like they had any intention of losing. Derrick Ansley’s simplified defense allowed some players to fire off and play with nothing but true intent, Scott was one of these players and he put his name out there with these plays.

One of the main reasons for my optimistic outlook on Matlocks development is who he was winning his reps against. I was actually taken aback by the names of the players he was going toe to toe with during his pretty limited time on the field. I’m sure if PFF Grades included opposition factors his unfairly low season score would have gotten a boost. I’ve included the names of each player he wins a rep against in the video below but here is the list just to pull it all together; Zack Martin, Lloyd Cushenberry, Trey Smith, Jermaine Eluemunor, Tevin Jenkins, Tyler Biadasz, Ben Powers and Joe Thuney. All of these players are established veterans who are either a household name or on their way to being one. With his profile as a lighter lineman with average explosive movement skills, it is very impressive for a sixth round rookie to be winning these reps through sheer strength and toughness. The best thing about his tape though is that he rarely loses reps, he may get stalled but I don’t think I saw a single rep where he got pushed back or pivoted out of his gap in 1 on 1 situations.

Matlock is an early down player with a primary responsibility of stopping the run. This may sound like I’m putting him in a box however in the landscape of modern rotation systems, this is still a primary role on any defense. Even though his total pass rush work was limited there were some flashes of how he can contribute despite his obvious failings. The way a guy with his profile can impact on passing downs is through both stunts and pocket control. His pocket control skills were illustrated on plays where he collapsed the middle of the pocket by knocking back the center and he also displayed some good awareness here too making it a priority for himself to stay over the top of the play when he wasn’t in the pass rush plan. This allows others to attack knowing he could clean up if the quarterback stepped up in the pocket. He needs to be a bit more fluid in disengaging with blocks to be truly effective here but I like what I have seen so far. Going into next season with an elite Edge rushing group means this will be even more important.

Scott displayed some decent ability to collapse the interior of the pocket when rushing from wider interior roles, he mostly bullrushed his way to success using his leg drive and a long arm to generate a leverage advantage but he often got stuck on the blocks when the lineman finally gets their feet under them, he really had no answer for this. Footwork isn’t his issue as he showed a few times that he can pivot around his inside hip and bend to adjust his angle of attack when rushing from an odd front or a strong side 3t in an even one. I think this shows that he doesn’t have to be taken off the field against pass heavy teams and he can still add some presence to the rush but he will need to work on his hands to be a factor teams need to account for. His other area of use was as a spiker on stunts, he not only uses his deceptive short area quickness to draw the attention of multiple blockers but he also used his length to disrupt any quick passing lanes when crossing the middle of the protection. His best moment in terms of passing rushing was against the Cowboys in the video below where he beats Zack Martin twice before registering his first and only pressure of the season, he was initially meant to play through the C-Gap but a late audible sent Kendricks on the blitz there so he swam inside the B Gap using smooth footwork married to his upper body movement which meant he could catch Martin flat footed, he showed off another swim move to beat him the second time and overall showed good tenacity to earn that QB pressure. It’s just a shame Dak is a wizard under pressure!

Neither of these traits are present frequent enough to say it’s a certainty to project them as a regular feature of his game but it does mean he can see the field more often than his 266 snaps in his rookie season. He quite literally never got on the field for 3rd downs and whilst I think he is a good player overall, this was for a good reason. He just does not have any kind of pass rush arsenal technically and his movements are not explosive enough to threaten the quarterback in time to be seen as a threat that requires blocking attention. My problem isn’t with his get off or his functional play strength, it’s with his ability to get off blocks with technique or circumnavigate them with speed.

Another area of his game that he needs to improve on is his balance in the second phase of the block. Matlock has an impressive ability to get to a winnable position inside the first second of the snap, you can see him flash past sliding tackles or get his hands onto blockers shoulders to win the leverage battle but after this it gets dicey. He often lost his balance by being far onto his toes and freezing his feet at the same time, I believe he is thinking too much here and this showed itself in Staley’s gap and a half where he had to scan to see how the play was developing and in this split second experienced players took advantage. He also had a real problem with tight ends seeing this hesitation and attacking him early washing him out of his gap. Scott made this worse by swimming inside the tackle leaving his exposed side open for shots, this is a typical rookie mistake that I’m sure he has learnt from after finding face cage shaped bruises on his ribcage come Monday morning. He also got snatched by more experienced lineman who read his weight coming forward, he desperately needs a counter to his simple bullrush, his hand accuracy can’t always be relied upon to win him reps and I think a full off-season as a veteran can allow him to take a leap forward as a rusher.

Now this was a very small sample size to draw conclusions from but in the brief Derrick Ansley era, he didn’t seem to repeat those same mistakes, he was flying off the ball (as were the rest of the defense) and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how he develops in a defense that empowers its players to play with more freedom between the whistles thanks to the pre-snap front flexibility which Minter uses to counter the ways offenses try to cause confusion upfront. The skillset he has to sniff out run stops from the backside was something we saw from him fairly often but this seemed to go up another gear towards the end of the season. Personally, I think this is what Minter and Harbaugh envision when they think about the interior of this line in their under even fronts; Poona at nose taking up double teams, Bosa and Mack setting a strong edge and Matlock, as the backside tackle, chases down any cutbacks allowing the secondary to flow with a bit more freedom.

In conclusion I have to say I came away with a much better understanding of why Jim Harbaugh has tried to elevate Matlock into the limelight. Not only is “Scotty” a shining example of the type of team-first consistent-effort player that he covets, but he also was an ascending player that contributed ahead of schedule towards the end of his rookie season. PFF may have warped people’s opinions of how he played because, well let’s be honest, not many people are prepared to watch 5+ hours of film on a day 3 rookie to form their own judgment. I can say with certainty that this grade does not come close to representing the impact he had on a down to down basis. Interior defensive lineman often do the dirty under-appreciated work and in Matlock’s case he is getting a rare nod from his new head coach ahead of his potential breakout season. It seems from camp reports that it will be a rotation of Poona Ford, Morgan Fox and Matlock with others stepping into situational roles so it seems like what he showed in those 266 snaps have been enough for him to earn more playing time as a starter. I think we will see a big step forward from #99 in a system that is more suited to his skillset and I for one will be rooting for him to become something the Chargers haven’t had since Corey Liuget hung up his cleats; a reliable long term tenure on the interior of the defensive line.

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