Men in the Middle: Defensive Tackles Making Their Mark in Today's NFL
Men in the Middle: Defensive Tackles Making Their Mark in Today's NFL originally appeared on Athlon Sports.
[Editor's note: This article is from Athlon Sports' 2025 NFL Preview Magazine. Order your copy today online or pick one up at retail racks and newsstands nationwide.]
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In Super Bowl LIX, the Philadelphia Eagles trounced the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22, and they throttled Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs' passing game with six sacks and 16 total pressures. When pressured, Mahomes completed only four passes on nine attempts for 48 yards, one touchdown, one interception and a 58.8 passer rating.
Perhaps most remarkably, the Eagles got all that pressure on Mahomes without a single blitz in the entire game — they never brought more than four rushers a single time. This was a testimony to the brilliance of defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, but it was also a major insight into the importance of interior pressure with the Eagles' defense.
In that game, three of Philadelphia's sacks and 10 of their pressures came from their interior defensive linemen — Milton Williams, Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis and Moro Ojomo. The Eagles did use stunts to amplify the talent of that interior defensive line, where their edge defenders would loop inside post-snap, but Philly's inside guys were able, more often than not, to create their own pressure, and that made all the difference. It allowed Fangio to utilize his preferred two-high coverage on 21 of Mahomes' 32 passing attempts without worrying about losing strength up front. The Chiefs weren't going to run the ball much down 24-0 at halftime, so the Eagles could just tee off and go after Mahomes.
Overall, it was perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the importance of interior defensive linemen in today's NFL. Williams parlayed that game (and an outstanding 2024 season) into a four-year, $104 million contract with the New England Patriots that included $63 million guaranteed. Which, from a guaranteed money perspective, made Williams the sixth-richest interior defensive tackle in the NFL, behind Chris Jones of the Kansas City Chiefs ($95 million), Christian Wilkins of the Las Vegas Raiders ($82.75 million), Nnamdi Madubuike of the Baltimore Ravens ($75.5 million), Quinnen Williams of the New York Jets ($66 million) and Derrick Brown of the Carolina Panthers ($63.165 million).
Milton Williams turned his excellent 2024 season and Super Bowl performance into a lucrative free-agent deal with the Patriots.© Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images
There are now 12 interior defensive linemen making more than $50 million guaranteed on their current contracts, as opposed to just nine edge rushers, and edge rushers are seen in the court of public opinion as the more important position.
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Why has the landscape changed? In the 2025 league year, there are eight interior defensive linemen with salary cap hits of more than $20 million. In 2020, there were only two — Aaron Donald of the Los Angeles Rams and DeForest Buckner of the Indianapolis Colts. Donald might be the best interior defensive lineman ever to play the position(s), which tends to skew things from a historical perspective. Today, big contracts for the bigger guys are the norm. This was accentuated by a 2025 draft that may have been deeper at IDL than any class before it. Four IDL were selected in the top 21 picks in the draft — five in the first round — and 30 were selected overall.
So, here's why NFL teams see interior defensive linemen as more important than ever before.
The shortest distance between two points
Obviously, the closer you are to the quarterback in terms of straight-line distance, the more quickly you can eliminate the gap between you and him to create pressure. So, interior defensive linemen have a bead on the quarterback, especially when it comes to the kinds of quick-game throws that are increasing in frequency and can leave edge defenders out in the cold regarding the timing of their pressures.
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Last season, on passes of zero or one step in the dropback, there were four edge defenders with 10 or more quarterback pressures — T.J. Watt of the Pittsburgh Steelers with 14, Myles Garrett of the Cleveland Browns with 12, Trey Hendrickson of the Cincinnati Bengals with 12 and Micah Parsons of the Dallas Cowboys with 11.
Meanwhile, there were five interior defensive linemen with 10 or more total pressures on those quickest possible throws — Cam Heyward of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Zach Allen of the Denver Broncos with 13, Carter with 12 and Madubuike and Osa Odighizuwa of the Dallas Cowboys with 10.
It's simple geometry, and it rings true. If you have interior defensive linemen with the ability to get past blockers with their physical abilities, you are more predisposed to create pressure on those quick-game throws, while your edge defenders are trying to keep up.
Wreaking havoc from every gap
Another reason interior defensive linemen are so important now is the increasing need for gap versatility. It's the rare pass-rusher who does his thing from one spot all season; more often, you'll see quarterback disruptors do their thing from a couple different gaps or more in the same drive. And the NFL's most creative defensive coaches, who are already more than conversant with these ideas with the players they already have, are quite excited about the potential to take prospects in this loaded IDL class and put them to work with what they've already seen.
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'The creativity part, I think that's what I see most in this group,' Washington Commanders head coach Dan Quinn told Athlon Sports at the NFL Scouting Combine. 'Here are the big ends who can move down. Here's the outside guys who can go inside. Those, to me, are things when … you want a league of matchups, and who can you work on, and who can you go against, and that adds a lot of value.'
Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald agrees.
'I don't think you're just targeting, hey, we need this specific position,' Macdonald told me a bit later. 'But how quickly they affect the quarterback, how they dictate protections, things like that. Hey, I want to start winning these schemes where now they're consistently accounting for me in the pass rush. It's our job as coaches to keep giving them advantageous opportunities to rush the quarterback. The common thread there, those are heckuva football players. They're really tough and really smart and play the game the right way, and it's our job as coaches to kind of make it come to life.'
Michigan's Mason Graham, selected fifth overall by the Cleveland Browns, lined up head over or to one side of the center 29% of the time last season, either over or outside the guard 60% of the time and either over or outside the tackles 11% of the time. Kenneth Grant, Graham's former linemate with the Wolverines, went 13th overall to the Miami Dolphins. Last season, Grant (who outweighed Graham by 35 pounds at 331 to 296 at the NFL Scouting Combine) spent 57% of his snaps beating up opposing centers and guards as an inside double-team soaker, but the rest of his time as a more aggressive 3-technique tackle, using his unusual agility to scream through gaps to the ball-carrier.
Mason GrahamKirby Lee-Imagn Images
'I feel like the combination — he's a bigger dude, obviously he plays 0-technique and 3-techniques, but we're both very athletic players, and I feel like we work well with each other,' Graham told Athlon Sports when asked how it was to work with Grant. 'Having two big guys that are dominant inside, I feel like we help each other, and I feel like he's an awesome player.'
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Then there's how you fit all those different types of talent into your fronts. There's a lot more to it than putting a big guy in a gap and telling him to hunt the quarterback.
'You start with what their measurables are,' Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane told Athlon Sports about the requirements for evaluating multi-gap defensive line prospects. 'What does this guy look like? What are his features, arm length, size? What does he do best? Is he best as a rusher? Like, is this a guy you want to line up in a 3-tech role and get a one-on-one against a guard? Is this guy just a power, straight-up ass-kicker? He's going to walk his guy back into the pocket. Maybe he's not going to flip his hips, but he's going to condense the pocket and push the guard or the center into the quarterback's lap.
'You want different pieces for different guys. You don't want to always just be able to have run-stuffers and nobody who can get to the quarterback. And you can't just have a slew of guys that can't stop the run when it's December, it's cold, it's snowing and guys are just going to line up in the backfield. So, we want to be versatile with our skill sets and be able to attack in as many different ways as we can.'
Which is really the name of the game when it comes to maximizing your interior defensive linemen.
Back to the future
When Buddy Ryan put together the Chicago Bears defenses that peaked in 1985 with perhaps the greatest defense in football history, one of his primary constructs was the 'Bear Front.' This was a five-man front with a nose tackle's head over the center, two larger defensive ends deployed as defensive tackles to the guards' outside shoulders and two faster edge defenders outside the tackles. The main idea was to force single-team blocks inside, because the center had to deal with the nose tackle in the middle of the line, and the guards couldn't help because they were each dealing with tackles to their outside alignments.
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Last season, NFL defenses lined up in five-man fronts on 810 snaps. Five years before, in 2019, they did so 629 times. A few years before, in 2016, they did so 464 times. Five-man fronts are becoming more popular, and for the same reasons now that existed back in Ryan's day. When you have more defensive fronts in which there are three interior defensive linemen to two edge defenders … well, again, the math is clear, as is the value.
Make way for the stuntmen
Line stunts, in which one lineman acts as the looper to set up another lineman as the penetrator to the pocket, have also increased in number and importance in recent years. There were 6,236 stunts in the 2024 season, and of those, 1,242 — a full 20% — were stunts in which the interior defensive linemen were the only ones doing the stunting, while the edge defenders were going after the quarterback in more traditional ways.
Since we began this article with the defending Super Bowl champion Eagles, let's end there as well. The Eagles didn't blitz the Chiefs once in Super Bowl LIX, but they did send 11 stunts after Mahomes. And against those 11 stunts, Mahomes completed 2-of-5 passes for 17 yards, two sacks, one offensive holding penalty, one interception returned for a touchdown and three quarterback scrambles. More often than not, it was Philadelphia's interior defensive linemen who were the tone-setters for the whole operation.
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'The four-man rush was key,' All-Pro linebacker Zack Baun said right after the Super Bowl win. 'We were getting pressure and collapsing the pocket. I was just in coverage, and I'm looking at the pocket just shrink on them, and the guys were eating up front for sure. With the guys we have, it's always enough.'
It's not just that the Eagles have more advanced plans for their interior defensive linemen, to their great benefit — it's that the entire NFL sees the big men in the middle as true difference-makers more than ever before.
All advanced metrics courtesy of Pro Football Focus and Sports Info Solutions.
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This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Jun 13, 2025, where it first appeared.
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