The challenge of turning Bryce Huff into an every-down player with the Eagles

The Eagles didn’t sign Bryce Huff to a three-year, $51 million contract to only rush the passer. When you get a contract like that, you better be more than a one-dimensional player.

Which Huff has never been.

In his first four seasons, Huff was almost exclusively a pass rusher. He played 1,303 defensive snaps with the Jets, and according to Pro Football Focus only 370 of them were on running plays. 

So he averaged 24.1 snaps per game and only 6.9 were against the run.

He was very productive on those pass-rush snaps, especially in his 10-sack breakthrough season last year. But now he’s got to be an every-down player, and nobody knows if he can do it.

“I do think he has the talent to do what we want him to do,” new Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said. “It's just he's got to get familiar with doing it. So it will be a work in progress. 

“Does he look like he can do it today? No. I do think eventually he will. He's taken the challenge on very well."  

Huff clearly has some work to do.

The analytics say Huff struggled playing the run last year. Pro Football Focus – which you always take with a grain or two of salt – gave him a lofty 86.8 pass-rush grade last year, which ranked 10^th out of 110 edge rushers who played at least 300 defensive snaps, but a 48.0 run defense grade (on 134 rushing plays), which ranked 100^th.

For the sake of comparison, Brandon Graham had a 72.1 run defense grade last year, Haason Reddick 63.7 and Josh Sweat 54.2.

Huff had a run defense grade of 64.9 in 2022 but played just 16 run snaps. He was at 46.6 on 99 run defense snaps in 2020 and 45.5 on 121 snaps in 2021.

There’s no question Huff is an elite pass rusher. But he bristled at the notion that he can’t play the run.

“If you watch my film, I've been physical in the run," he said after practice Thursday. "I played a lot of run (defense). I’ve got good film. So I'm not really sure where that reputation came from. I guess it's just because of my size. So people will kind of assume that. But if you watch the film, I feel like I've done well in the run.”

Huff, who is 6-foot-5, 255 pounds, said people assume he can’t play the run since he wasn’t asked to very often with the Jets, who had a deep defensive line that allowed him to focus on getting after the quarterback.

“We got so much depth and I was only playing third down so people probably just assumed that I wasn't good vs. the run because of that,” he said. “But I feel like my film speaks more to my ability to stop the run than assumptions.”

The first two days of training camp, Huff has done a little bit of everything. 

“They got me out there, pass downs, dropping into coverage, run downs, stopping the run as well as rushing,” he said. “So that's a lot more than what I was doing in New York since I was like essentially just the third-down player or obvious passing downs until last year.”

The Eagles didn’t sign Huff to be a situational pass rusher or 3^rd-down specialist.

They signed him to replace Reddick, who played nearly 1,700 snaps in his two years with the Eagles - 74 percent of the defensive snaps.

For the sake of comparison, Huff played just 671 snaps the last two years - 32 percent of the Jets’ defensive snaps. 

How do you go from 28 snaps per game – which Huff played last year, by far a career high – to 50 per game?

Huff and Sweat will be the starters and while Graham and Nolan Smith will rotate in, Graham’s snaps will be limited because he’s 36 and winding down his career in his 15th season, and Smith needs to prove he can be an effective rusher to earn significant snaps in that rotation.

“Just coming out here and giving full effort every play,” Huff said. “And when we have conditioning, I just go all-out. When we have reps, when they tell us to run through the end zone, I'm going to run through the end zone and just give my best effort so that on game day I'll have … the conditioning to be able to get the job done. 

“I've always trained to play that amount of snaps and I've always trained to play a full role in case somebody were to go down with an injury. I've always had that mindset.”