Adisa Isaac’s Second Act

In the Span of 12 Months, the Penn State Pass Rusher Went From Surefire Starter/Budding Star on the Edge to Almost an Afterthought Coming Back From Injury This Spring. It’s About Time We Get Reacquainted, Don’tcha Think?

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Background

At 6-foot-4 and 244 pounds, returning Penn State pass rusher Adisa Isaac is a classic “tweener” — tall but short-armed, lean even for a 4-3 DE. Probably projects in the NFL as a 3-4 OLB (I happen to know the Steelers’ Alex Highsmith is 6’4/242) so Isaac may eventually need to get comfortable playing backwards (in coverage) on roughly 10-20% of his snaps at the next level. Assuming Manny Diaz’s defensive system doesn’t deviate too far from what we saw from Brent Pry the past 6 seasons, Isaac won’t have many opportunities to show that facet of his game this season or next.

As a senior in high school, Isaac was the consensus No. 1 recruit out of the state of New York in 2018. He recorded 25 sacks (that’s twenty, and then five more) during his final season at the prep level, shattering both school and league records.

College Career

The Brooklyn-native tallied 4.0 sacks and 16 stops in his first two seasons in Happy Valley despite his role as a rotational piece behind current NFLers Yetur Gross-Matos, Shaka Toney and Odafe (nee Jayson) Oweh.

Despite receiving limited reps, Isaac definitely made an impression on his EDGE contemporaries. During various media availability sessions in the 2019 and 2020 seasons, teammates showered Isaac with praise. Oweh said that Isaac’s get-off at the snap was “crazy” before attaching superlatives like “twitchy, strong, and explosive” to his name. Toney went one step further and waxed poetic about Isaac for an entire minute – bookending his flowery soliloquy with bold predictions on where Isaac would land in the NFL Draft one day.

In Pro Football Focus’s preseason list of top 10 pass-rush units entering the 2021 season, lead college analyst Anthony Treash wrote: “Don’t sleep on Adisa Isaac, who … has the tools to be just as impactful as Oweh and Toney were for Penn State.”

That’s high praise. Assuming life stuck to the script, Isaac probably would have had a tough ‘stay-or-go’ decision to make following the 2021 college season. Here comes the Behind the Music act break: “But it didn’t quite work out that way.”

An undisclosed, non-football related injury sidelined the third-year defender for the entire 2021 season – opening the door for Temple transfer Arnold Ebiketie to vulture pass-rush reps that were earmarked for Isaac months earlier. This spring, Isaac has returned to practice but hasn’t quite generated the same buzz he did last April…so we felt it’d be prudent to re-examine Isaac’s film from his freshman and sophomore seasons and remind ourselves what had us so excited about Isaac’s upside a year ago. For this exercise, we specifically watched the 2019 Maryland game, the 2020 Ohio State Whiteout played in front thousands of overpriced pieces of cardboard, and the 2020 Michigan win.

Film Review

Isaac’s go-to move is a Von Miller dip. He corners and hides his chest extremely well, limiting the surface area blockers have to work with (plays 1-3). His speed-to-power game is unfair (plays 4-6). His hips are exceptionally fluid and he’s working on one of those cross-steps that makes it look like Myles Garrett can teleport (play 7).

Against the run Adisa’s a sticky tackler, whiffing on only one of 25 career tackle attempts, per PFF. He has disruptive power (plays 1-2 below) and he can make you pay if you over-commit to his power (play 3 below shows the seedlings of a promising hump move). He’s strong enough to not be bothered by TEs 1v1 (plays 4-6) yet nimble enough to juke right around the bigger boys (play 7). He also has spectacular pursuit and speed off the backside (plays 8-10); remember the comp I made earlier to Alex Highsmith?

Isaac was already drawing a TON of attention from opponents early in his career, especially the 2020 OSU game. The Buckeyes were playing the kid like he was TJ Watt: chips (plays 1-2 below), kick-outs (plays 3-7 below), throwing multiple TEs in his face (plays 8-9), up to and including old-school double teams (plays 10-11).

I’d like to see Adisa flash his own hands faster to swipe/chop away blockers’ mitts before they can lasso him in. Think of a pass rusher’s arms like a car’s crumple zones: they absorb and redirect blows that, if landed on the rusher’s center of mass, would knock him off his arc, buying the QB time.

When Isaac commits to the run, he forgets everything he’s ever learned about pass rushing and QB containment. He tends to fall for the play action a little too much, but that’s fixable.

In the 301 snaps he played his first two seasons he only dropped into coverage 18 times (6 percent). He has the raw tools (athleticism, change of direction) but there isn’t much of a sample size there.

2022 Outlook

Ellis Brooks, Brandon Smith, Jesse Luketa, Jaquan Brisker, Tariq Castro-Fields, and transfers Arnold Ebiketie and Derrick Tangelo are all headed to the draft. Only Georgia’s defense will have to replace more defensive productivity (source: speculation).

Notables returning to the DE room include Nick Tarburton and Smith Vilbert. Tarburton has the highest returning snap count; his 10 QB hurries were second only to Ebiketie (32) in 2021. Vilbert flashed in the Outback Bowl with 3 sacks although there was visible rawness there. Five-star recruit Dani Dennis-Sutton (nickname suggestion: The Dentist) could be a wildcard but Isaac projects to be a starter among that group – assuming he’s healthy.