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Kain Medrano was one of the Commanders more intriguing draft picks this year. He’s ultra athletic with fantastic upside as a coverage defender, which is highly valued in the modern NFL. However he struggled with tackling in college, which is why he fell to the sixth round despite his athleticism and coverage ability. So I was eager heading into the Commanders preseason opener against the Patriots to see how Medrano would get on, particularly in the run game, which is the weaker part of his game.
Medrano played more snaps than anybody and almost played the entire game. I’m only going to focus on his first half performance because that’s when he faced the Patriots first and second team offenses. The defense as a unit obviously struggled, but how did Medrano do on a personal level? Let’s take a closer look.
Early on in the game, you could see a little tentativeness from Medrano in the run game. He was a little hesitant at times when diagnosing the play, which put him on the backfoot and enabled blockers to work up to him. The Patriots ran two draw plays in the first quarter, where the quarterback receives the snap and looks like he’s going to throw, before suddenly handing the ball off to the running back on a delayed hand off. Medrano struggled on both of those plays.
However, while it was a bit of a rough start for Medrano, he started to settle in a bit as the game progressed and there were some positive signs from him. In college, he wasn’t really a super physical player that took on offensive lineman and landed strong, explosive punches to shed blocks and make tackles. He was more of a finesse player that used his athleticism to avoid blocks and beat blockers that way. But in a Dan Quinn defense, the linebacker has to be physical, and Medrano showed he was not only willing, but also capable of being physical and holding his own against offensive lineman that are much bigger than him.
Here we have a trap scheme from the Patriots. It’s another good test for Medrano because it gives him some false read keys and he has to be able to process and react quickly to not get eaten up on the play like he did on the two draw schemes earlier. On this trap play, the Patriots fake blocking the nose tackle with both the center and left tackle, who step towards the defender before then changing direction and climbing up to the linebackers on the second level. The left guard pulls to the edge to block the defensive end, while the tight end to the right sifts all the way back across to trap the defensive tackle.
From Medrano’s point of view, you can see at the snap he looks at the tight end and spots him immediately working down the...
