New on Sports Illustrated: Aldon Smith Is Playing Even Better Than You Think After Five Years Out of the NFL

After five years out of the NFL, Aldon Smith currently leads the NFL sacks and is playing even better for the Cowboys than the statistics show.

Rams head coach Sean McVay was apparently curious about new Cowboy Aldon Smith, like the rest of the world, because on McVay’s first play-call of the season he went right at the pass-rusher taking his first snap of professional football since Nov. 15, 2015.

The Rams sent Robert Woods in jet motion after the snap, forcing the now 31-year-old defensive end to carry the unenviable responsibility of both chasing down the wide receiver and maintaining some kind of containment on Jared Goff. He was trapped, maybe as a way for McVay to get a gauge on one of the offseason’s biggest mysteries and evaluate his rust. The ball was floated over Smith’s fingertips and Woods rumbled downfield for 20 yards.

It was the one moment this season that anyone might have felt confident running in Smith’s direction, because by the end of the half, McVay was looking at one of the better defensive players in football and needed extra help to contain him.

At the 4:35 mark in the second quarter, Smith was being double-teamed, which largely proved futile. With his right arm, he performed a swim move on tight end Tyler Higbee, clubbing him to the ground on the backside of the maneuver, which prevented Higbee from getting to the next level on his run block. With his left arm, Smith shoulder-pressed Gerald Everett and was able to bear down onto running back Cam Akers, pinning him in the backfield for a gain of just one yard. Most of the designed runs in his direction weren’t going anywhere. Unlike other blue-chip defensive ends, Smith wasn’t jettisoning upfield, creating larger voids for L.A.’s running backs to hammer.

As we head into this weekend, prepare for more announcers to continue telling the comeback story of Smith, a destructive first-round pick out of Missouri in 2011 who earned All-Rookie honors his first season and had 33.5 sacks and 56 quarterback hits over his first two years. After run-ins with the league’s personal conduct and substance abuse policies, a DUI, a hit and run and a domestic violence incident where he was initially charged with “

assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury, false imprisonment and vandalism” (he would end up pleading no contest to two misdemeanor charges of violating a court order and false imprisonment), he washed out of the NFL. He was only conditionally reinstated by the league back in May. For our part, we’ll pass on the narrative of this being a redemptive arc, given that on-field accomplishments should not be a measure of off-field growth. But Smith himself says he has done a great deal of legwork to get himself into a healthy place.

For the sake of this piece, we’ll just say this: It’s pretty incredible that anyone who has not played in five years is not only playing this well but is playing even better than the statistics show.

Smith leads the league with four sacks, but an in-depth look at his first three weeks shows someone who is doing so much more than pressuring the quarterback. Out of 175 defensive snaps so far in 2020, we counted 44 in which he had a direct effect on the success of the defensive play—meaning that roughly once in every four plays, something Smith did buoyed the Cowboys collectively. If he was not logging a sack, he was creating pressure. If he was not in the backfield, he was making cross-field hustle plays and diving shoestring tackles. In Weeks 2 and 3, his adequacy in coverage was tested by two of the best quarterbacks in the league—Matt Ryan and Russell Wilson—and Smith appeared to hold his own. According to NFLGSIS, the Cowboys are a plus-0.4 against the run when Smith is on the field, meaning they are half a yard better with him simply in the lineup. That has translated to saving roughly 30 yards so far.

He put a quarterback hit on Jared Goff in the season opener that directly resulted in a wobbly pass that was picked off by Chidobe Awuzie at a critical moment. He had two other hits or pressures this season that caused errant passes, but both times the interceptions were dropped.

Against the Falcons, he dove and nabbed Ryan by the shoelaces on a third-down scramble near the goal line that would have resulted in a fresh set of downs for the Falcons but, instead, forced them to kick a field goal in the first quarter. Dallas ended up winning that game by a point.

Teams that try to block him with tight ends end up looking foolish. Against the Rams, Smith knocked Johnny Mundt to the ground on a fourth-quarter Akers handoff with what looked like a judo toss.

Smith’s shoulder strength alone allows him to remain steadfast amid double-team blocks and prevent the defense from washing him out of the play or forcing him to break containment. The NBC broadcast attributed part of this success to “heavy hands,” though Smith, in general, seems much more of a solid, physical player than he was coming out of college. Over those 175 snaps it was rare to see him knocked backward by an offensive lineman. At worst, he generated pressure to a stalemate.

By the time Dallas reached Seattle for its Week 3 matchup, Smith was no longer a curiosity like he was when McVay tested him. On the first snap of Sunday’s game, Smith batted down a pass. On the second play, he punched Seahawks left tackle Duane Brown with a move to the chest, ripped inside and tackled Russell Wilson in the backfield after Wilson had double-clutched a throw. It was his first of three sacks on the afternoon.

It cemented a guarantee that Smith will be game planned against and not game planned for. Who would have guessed that four years—or even four weeks—ago.