Derek Wolfe is about to become a very rich man this offseason, and there’s nobody to thank but himself.
Wolfe, who was drafted in the second round by the Denver Broncos back in 2012, has grown from a solid role player to a bonafide stud, and he told Eric Goodman and Les Shapiro of the Afternoon Drive that it’s all thanks to the work he put in prior to the season.
“I switched up my training this offseason and started working with another guy — with Loren Landow, and he does an awesome job, everything is position specific with them,” Wolfe said. “I worked on a lot of pass rush. Normally, I’m always just working on how strong I really am and how I can be stout. I did that and combined it with a lot more quickness stuff, hand-movement stuff, boxing.”
And it’s been the combination of those two abilities — defending the run and rushing the passer — that have made Wolfe such a valuable player. Not many defensive lineman are as adept as Wolfe is at both skills, and he takes great pride in that.
“You take pride in being able to stop the run,” Wolfe said. “I take pride in that. But I also take offense to people saying I can’t rush the passer, and I don’t know where that comes from. Even the year I only played 12 games, I still had 4.5 sacks.”
Through the regular season, Wolfe has totaled 5.5 sacks (in 12 games) — just shy of his career high, six, from 2012 — but sacks don’t tell the whole story; as a pure pass rusher, he has improved leaps and bounds.
Through his first three seasons in the NFL, Wolfe never earned a positive pass rushing grade from Pro Football Focus. In fact, he never graded higher than a -5.9. This year, though, he’s jumped all the way up to 6.5, and it’s been on display all season.
There’s a reason why nobody on Denver’s defense has 15-plus sacks, and it’s because Wade Phillip’s pass rush isn’t about any one individual player; it’s a unit, in every sense of the word.
And in two weeks, Wolfe and the rest of this defensive front will be ready to take on whomever makes it out of the first round. But as Wolfe said on Wednesday, it won’t matter which team that is. To him, they’re all just “Nameless, faceless victims.”
Listen to the full discussion below …
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