Dan Moore Jr. has steadily gotten better over the course of his four NFL seasons, but if there is one thing you can count on, it’s a massive game from Cleveland Browns DE Myles Garrett when the two match up against each other.
Throughout Moore’s career, by far his worst games have come against the Browns. In his rookie season, he received a 0.00 pass-blocking grade from Pro Football Focus in his first-ever game against Garrett, for example. He had a similarly low 3.5 grade (out of 100) against the Browns in Week 2 last year.
While he technically allowed two sacks and five total pressures against the Browns last Thursday in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 24-19 loss, Moore had the best pass-blocking grade of his career against the Browns. It wasn’t excellent, but a respectable 68.8.
Given that it was Moore’s worst outing of the season in terms of sacks and pressures allowed, I wanted to take a closer look at his game.
It was a promising start for Moore. On the first pass-blocking opportunity, he absorbed the initial rush from Garrett and used a snatch and trap to shut down his rush. It appeared that Moore came out with a plan and executed it well on his first attempt.
He didn’t win with that particular move again, and Garrett started winning a lot with his bull rush. Garrett was doing a nice job getting low, coiling up those hands, and then bringing his hips and his arms at the same time to walk Moore back. The only way to really slow this down for Moore is trying to get the first significant contact and landing his punch. He was a bit timid with his punch throughout this game, probably because Garrett is great at countering a bad punch with either speed or power.
They gave Moore a lot of help with Darnell Washington, Pat Freiermuth, or Jaylen Warren chipping Garrett. On this play, Garrett looked like he was playing on bags. He easily stepped around Freiermuth in one direction and then stepped back around Moore in the other direction to quickly pressure Russell Wilson. Somehow that resulted in a deep completion for Wilson, but it was way too easy for Garrett.
Although Moore’s guy made the play on both of these sacks, I wouldn’t necessarily place the blame all on him. Here, he was doing an okay job of pushing Garrett up the arc. Garrett got a hand on Wilson to force the fumble, but it really shouldn’t have knocked the ball loose. That one is on Wilson, and he had all kinds of room to run or set his feet to pass had he escaped the pocket to the left.
The other sack that Moore allowed, he was beat more soundly, but the internal pressure also allowed certainly didn’t help. There ended up being two defensive tackles on Isaac Seumalo to collapse the pocket, which gave Wilson nowhere to go with Garrett’s rush. This one can be more easily blamed on Moore, but it wasn’t solely his fault.
Considering how silly Moore has looked in the past against Garrett, this wasn’t an awful showing. The run blocking wasn’t quite as good, but he had easily his best pass-blocking performance of his career against Garrett and the Browns.
