A day after sacking the quarterback, recovering a fumble and nearly intercepting a pass, rookie LaRon Landry delivered a stinging self-evaluation. He wasn’t buying his own hype.
Rather than just look at his big plays, Landry remembered the time New York’s Leon Washington left him trailing on a pass route with a little shake. And the penalty he drew for roughing the passer. And the time he missed a tackle because of a poor angle.
“I grade myself a C- or even a D,” he said. “I feel it’s never good enough for me.”
Well, it’s been good enough for just about everyone else. After playing mostly deep in the Cover 2 for the first seven games of his NFL career, Landry had a chance to reveal his other side. The one that loves to blitz and crunch quarterbacks. He blitzed 12 times in Sunday’s 23-20 win over the Jets, drilling quarterback Kellen Clemens hard on at least four occasions.
“There are still many things he doesn’t understand about this game,” Redskins assistant head coach/defense Gregg Williams said. “But he corrects his mistakes and he gets to the football fast and he gets there in a bad mood.”
“He played his type of football,” Redskins corner Fred Smoot said.
They brought him in a variety of ways, not to mention more often than they had planned. On his roughing penalty, Landry, seven yards off the line on the left hash, looked to his right two seconds before the ball was snapped. There, he saw Sean Taylor starting to run towards the line. Landry took off a second later. The running back, who had been on Landry’s side, went to Taylor creating a path for Landry. His lone mistake was leading with his helmet.
On his sack, the line slanted to the right, London Fletcher blitzed off the edge and Landry raced from the same side untouched to Clemens. Learning how to blitz effectively is something he learned at LSU under then-coach Nick Saban, who ran pro schemes.
“I’ve had fun every game,” Landry said. “But, yeah, I love to blitz and getting hits on the quarterback. It’s like I’m back at LSU.”
Landry has shown he can blitz, play physical and make athletic plays. In the second quarter, he nearly intercepted a pass as he started towards the line then dropped into coverage.
“He’s what we thought we were going after in the draft,” Redskins coach Joe Gibbs said. “He feels like he belongs. Some guys come up here and say, ‘This is what I was born to do.’”
