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All Work and No Play for J.J. Watt


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Mrs. Watt's little boy Justin James has grown into a bad bad man who strikes terror into the hearts of quarterbacks throughout the nation. He is a Shaolin monk of football! He thinks it is TAKING ADVANTAGE of his celebrity to greet schoolchildren and hear them shriek.

Heh heh, what a nut ball. I love this jab-and-go move he does:

The start of his rookie season was unspectacular — some scattered sacks but little pointing to what we see now. “Some of it was us,” Phillips says, laughing. It took Phillips about 15 weeks to learn the same lesson Watt’s coaches had in Madison. The only way to unleash J.J. Watt is by letting him break the rules.

JJ Watt jab and go gif Imgur broncos texans

One of Watt’s favorite moves is one he calls the jab-and-go.3 It typically starts with him lining up just outside of a guard. In Phillips’s one-gap defense, that space between the guard and tackle is Watt’s responsibility. The standard way players are taught to control that gap is by firing into it just as the ball is snapped, to claim that space with the most speed and authority possible. Every so often, Watt will eschew those lessons. Instead, he takes a step inside, momentarily leaving him and the defense vulnerable. “If it works, you’re giving up your gap for a brief second to gain an advantage in getting back in your gap more effectively,” Watt says. “If it doesn’t, you’re giving up your gap, and you’re also blocked, so now there’s one gap unaccounted for.” Usually, it leaves a guard so off-balance that he has to catch his footing just to keep from falling on his face.

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