Colts: In new scheme, Tarell Basham gets his chance to flourish

Zak Keefer | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Colts Head Coach Frank Reich on last day of OTA practice Indianapolis Colts Head Coach Frank Reich discusses the last organized team activities practice before camp on Thursday, June 7, 2018.

INDIANAPOLIS – The thing about Tarell Basham’s rookie season: No one ever seemed to sugarcoat it. No coachspeak from up top, no spin from the coordinator, no let’s-just-give-him-time from the general manager, and certainly no excuses from the third-round pick who drifted into irrelevance for much of the year before a hard dose of humility stirred him back to life.

The NFL will do that to you. Does it to most rookies. Did it to Tarell Basham.

For a while, the coaches wouldn’t play him. At one juncture, the GM called him out on the radio. “We need more out of Basham,” Chris Ballard said midseason, comments he didn’t regret then and doesn’t regret now. “We need him to grow up and continue to show us he can be the pass-rusher we saw in college and, right now, he’s not there.” Even Basham himself called it like it was: “I’m probably not where they need me to be,” he confessed at one point.

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There are no shortcuts in this league. He had to learn that. Took him six months, but he did.

“He struggled early,” Ballard offered this spring, summing up Basham’s largely forgettable, two-sack, seven-tackle rookie campaign. “But then you started seeing the flashes.”

The flashes did come, finally – his would-be-clinching sack in Cincinnati, a recovered punt late in the loss at Baltimore, repeated bursts on special teams – but only after Basham began to understand games aren’t won on Sundays but Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. In college he’d coast through workouts and ball out on game day. In the pros, if he coasted in practice, he’d end up on the inactives list.

Now the page flips, and everything changes.

Enter: Year 2.

Enter: A new defensive system.

Enter: A fresh chance to flourish.

“He looks a lot better, man,” veteran Jabaal Sheard said of Basham last week. “He looks more focused, more driven, and he’s working harder.”

Perhaps no player on this roster will benefit more from the Indianapolis Colts’ defensive shift from three down linemen to four. Basham was admittedly lost last season, trying to acclimate himself to the rigors of the NFL, trying to learn the outside linebacker spot – a position he never once played in college – and trying to find a way onto the field. By midseason he was coming in on his off days, soaking in as much of the scheme as he could. Progress came. Came slowly, but it came.

The coaching staff overhaul this spring and subsequent move to new coordinator Matt Eberflus’ 4-3 front – “the system I was raised in,” Basham says, smiling – could prove the catalyst that unleashes the Colts’ next great pass rusher.

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At least they hope.

Central to the new scheme’s success are the defensive ends’ ability to get home – to get to the quarterback. The Colts haven’t had a pass rusher good enough to keep offensive coordinators up at night since Robert Mathis in 2013. This year, they need it more than ever. At least three former outside linebackers from the 3-4 system – Basham, Jabaal Sheard and John Simon – are moving to the line, their game-day duties changing dramatically. Instead of standing up and playing read-and-react football, the scheme has been simplified: Hand-in-dirt, go get the ball. Then do it again. And again. And again.

“It’s a rush-and-cover defense,” Basham explained, “and we gotta be able to rush for those guys to cover.”

That’s just it: If the line doesn’t do its job, the defense won’t have a chance. This is how the Colts’ unit from the 2000s was constructed, bookended by two lethal QB-seekers. The whole thing worked because of Nos. 93 and 98.

Problem is, there’s no Dwight Freeney on this roster. No Robert Mathis, either, unless you’re scanning the coaching staff. The onus is on this new-look defensive line to make a substantial jump, and to relieve the pressure on a shaky and unsettled linebacking core. Plenty of that rests on the shoulders of Basham, the third-round pick from 2017 who needs to prove, if not this season then certainly the next, that he was worth the investment.

“I definitely feel that,” Basham said of the important of the ends in the new scheme. “Gotta love it when the stress is on.”

Good. Because it certainly is.

Early indications, incomplete and a little impetuous at this point – it’s still June, after all – are encouraging. For the first time in his career, Basham has been regularly running with the first-team defense during OTAs, opposite Sheard as the other starting defensive end, and ahead of Simon. Basham likes it.

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“You get the best look possible on the field that day,” he said. “You start to build chemistry with the guys that have been doing it for such a long time and at such a high rate.”

But running with the ones in June and doing so in September are two very different things. Coaches routinely point out how drastically things can change once the pads go on in training camp, and how much shuffling the depth chart can see. Remember: Every spot on this defense remains up for grabs. Every single one.

Aiding Basham, seven weeks ahead of his second NFL training camp: A slimmed-down figure, 15 pounds of fat lost in favor of more explosion, more flexibility and more bend on the edge. He’ll need strength at his new position, sure. He’ll also need endurance. So many of Freeney and Mathis’ fourth-quarter sacks came on more persistence than power.

“It’s simpler, it’s simpler but it’s more taxing,” Basham said of the new scheme. “More physical. It’s go. It’s nonstop. It’s not sitting, waiting, reading, being in the right place, having the right hand placement. It’s all about getting off (the ball) and going to make a play, which takes a bigger physical toll but less of a mental (toll).”

Maybe this is what a second-year player is supposed to say in the middle of summer, the grind of camp and the stress of the season still months away.

Maybe Basham’s really ready to make the jump.

Maybe the scheme change is exactly what he needs.

In any regard, his rookie season is over. Time to produce. And not just in flashes. Time to produce every single Sunday.

Like he said: Gotta love it when the stress is on.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.