One of the big stories of the preseason and early portion of the regular season is Broderick Jones’ sudden regression. Most of his issues were related to the same issue. He wasn’t effectively using his hands, which was affecting nearly every aspect of his game. It wasn’t a perfect performance for Jones last Sunday, but his punch appears to be coming back. His hands were significantly more active in the Week 3 win over the Los Angeles Chargers.
For what it’s worth, he shed the brace from his right elbow. Many had been pointing to his brace and the associated injury as one reason for his regression. Whether that is what was wrong or not, I can’t say for sure, but he took a step in the right direction. Mike Tomlin wanted to give him an opportunity to respond to his poor performance in Week 2 and he did.
Joey Bosa was injured on one of the first plays of the game, but Jones started out strong against him. Too often this year, Jones’ arms were too wide, and he was giving up his chest. He was also playing a lot of catch and not taking the fight to his opponent with first significant contact. On the first play, he landed his punch on Bosa and then drove his feet to bury him into the ground.
Some of these plays look banal, but he was previously unable to do the routine things routinely. Here is another one where he effectively uses his punch and lands his hands to the defender’s chest plate to win the rep.
This rep, against OLB Tuli Tuipulotu, Jones gets into perfect position with his quick feet off the snap and once again makes solid contact with his punch to slow down the rush before resetting his hands and shocking the defender to the ground.
Like I said, there is still plenty of room for improvement. One thing in particular that was very rough was his snatch-and-trap, a move where he attempts to snatch a defender’s punch to use his momentum against him and plant him on his face. Here are two reps where he fails at that technique, and it looks really ugly.
The first one resulted in him bear-hugging DL Morgan Fox, which probably could have been called holding. The second clip shows him overcommitting to the snatch-and-trap and pairing it with sloppy footwork to completely whiff on the block. Even with the sloppy technique, these are things Jones wasn’t really attempting in the first couple games of the season. His active hands are encouraging.
While he was engaging his hands more, he still needs to work on his ability to latch onto defenders to stay in control of a rep. This run play in the red zone, Jones initially won the rep with strong hand placement, and he rolled his hips to generate a lot of power. The defender uses his outside arm to pull his way back across Jones’ face to limit Najee Harris to a minimal gain. I don’t know that Harris would have scored on that play, but it would have been a much bigger gain.
Imperfections aside, this was a step in the right direction for Jones. He seems to be getting his hands more involved as a blocker and that is helping alleviate some of the big issues that I have written about ad nauseam this year. With Troy Fautanu possibly out for the season, Jones is going to need to continue moving in the right direction as the Steelers’ starting right tackle.
