Indianapolis Colts: Trade for Vontae Davis Looking Like a Bust More and More Each Week

I’ll admit I could have been wrong when I said the trade giving up a second round pick to the Miami Dolphins for Vontae Davis was great. I thought Davis was going to be a lock-down corner and give the Indianapolis Colts two strong weapons on the outside areas of the field. Boy was I wrong.

In three games Davis has played he showed me he can’t play tight press coverage. I was so sick of him taking the Jacob Lacey approach of respecting the passing game too much and playing 10+ yards off the line. The Colts pass rush couldn’t get to the quarterback’s quick enough due to that and took a bunch of the blame. I heard all over Indianapolis that our pass rush needed to get better. What people failed to realize is it’s actually Davis’ lack of defending and playing tight coverage.

This Colts team moved out of that old Cover 2 system that clearly didn’t work to more of a hybrid 3-4 pass rushing system that put corners on their own island to play tight press coverage. Davis’ inability to do that gave opposing quarterback’s enough time to hit receivers on short slant routes and allowed drives to continue and march down the field with ease.

In the Green Bay Packers game, Davis was injured and didn’t play. His replacement Cassius Vaughn played his heart out and showed Davis what a real corner looks like. Vaughn didn’t respect their game and played tight on the line all day. Him and Jerraud Powers doing that gave the Colts enough time to exploit Green Bay’s lack of protection of Aaron Rodgers. With Davis, the Colts probably would have been torched on defense and the Packers would have scored at ease.

With Vaughn and Powers playing tight man coverage, the Colts pass rush showed up and I don’t think it was a fluke they sacked Rodgers five times on Sunday. The five sacks was a season high for a game too I might add. That came from tight coverage on the receivers and not allowing Rodgers to dump off short passes to someone Davis would have been defending.

If it was up to me Vaughn would be the starter Sunday at Metlife Stadium.