Washington began the season with Norman at LCB and Bashaud Breeland at RCB. They clearly felt that their duo was good enough to just line up and win one-on-one against the offense, and because of that, they haven’t incorporated any of the schematic wrinkles into the defense that Seattle does because of what Sherman allows them to do. Instead, the Redskins simply ran their defense as if they had just taken it out of the box and expected it to work. Breeland—talented though he is—just isn’t quite good enough to live with receivers as destructive as Brown and Bryant, and while Norman has been perfect against that pair, Breeland has been eaten alive. He surrendered 113 yards and two scores to Brown on Week 1, and had allowed four catches for 57 yards to Bryant before the team decided they needed to make a change.
From that point, Norman was asked to start following Bryant. When the fourth quarter opened, Norman was lined up one-on-one against the Cowboys’ top WR on the right side of the defense, a departure from his usual spot on the left. Strangely, there was no straw that broke the camel’s back to cause the change—the team just decided to make the switch heading into the final period.
In the final quarter of the game, Norman lined up across from Bryant on 13 snaps, 11 of which came on the right side of the defense. There were only three snaps in which Bryant was on the field that Norman didn’t follow him in the final period, as well as two snaps for which Bryant wasn’t on the field at all.
Bryant had seven catches for 102 yards in the game, but only one of those catches came in the final quarter—and that was on one of the three snaps where Norman was not lined up across from him.
