Collapsing the pocket.

Regular readers of Joe know Joe isn’t much of a fan — hell, no fan at all — of quarterback pressures.

All pressures mean is a guy got close to a quarterback. That’s horseshoes and hand grenades stuff. Close doesn’t cut it. Good quarterbacks are not fazed by pressure.

Having typed that, Joe can understand how pressures from a defensive tackle actually do mean something. It’s not the be-all, end-all to getting after the quarterback. But it helps.

If a defensive tackle isn’t on a stunt that takes him outside, getting pressure on the quarterback up the middle means he’s collapsing the pocket, at least a little.

Quarterbacks hate that, specifically immobile quarterbacks. It eliminates the possibility of stepping up in the pocket and delivering. Pressure from a defensive tackle up the middle eliminates an escape route (if you have anything at all coming from the edge).

A quick example was when Vita Vea came off the disabled list to play against the Packers in the 2020 NFC title game.

Vea collapsed the pocket and as a result, Bucs sacks king Shaq Barrett went bananas that day and the Bucs advanced to the Super Bowl.

So the following is both encouraging and frustrating.

It seems Kancey, per NextGen Stats, had the fourth-most pressures in the second half of the season. Obviously, since Kancey is a tackle, that means he was often coming from up the gut.

But this also underscores how godawful the Bucs’ edge rush was. With Kancey getting so many pressures, you’d think Vea would be in the mix, too. Per Pro-Football-Reference.com, Vea had but 14 pressures in the same games, Weeks 9-18.

Still, with Kancey collapsing the pocket so often, where the hell was the edge rush?

Back in pass coverage, probably.