Raiders’ Key is pass-rush student
Raiders defensive end Arden Key has a quick spin move, but he can slide in pretty smoothly, too.
Just ask Chuck Smith, the former NFL defensive end who now trains some of the league’s best pass rushers. A few years ago, Smith recalls, he received a direct message on Twitter from Key that caught his eye. For one thing, Key was asking for pass-rush tutelage while still in high school. And Key’s approach did not lack for confidence.
“He was like, ‘Coach, I want to be a great pass rusher,’ ” Smith said. “‘I can be the greatest pass rusher of all time.’ ”
Said Key this week: “The
worst thing he could say was no.”
Smith did not say no. Intrigued, he sought out video of Key and saw a tall, lanky fellow Georgian who seemed serious about getting after the quarterback. Smith invited Key to train with him, and the two continued to work together as Key became a top college player at LSU, then a third-round draft pick in April by the Raiders.
After falling to the second day of the draft, largely because of a tumultuous final college season, Key told reporters he considered himself “a firstround talent — top-five.” Asked in a phone interview if he would agree with that assessment, it was Smith’s turn to sound confident.
“Arden,” Smith said, “should have been 1, 2 or 3.”
As Smith recalls, Key began attending his “Big Skill Sunday” workouts as a high school senior in Union City, Ga., driving about 50 miles each weekend to a training facility north of Atlanta. There, Smith said, players would train for “hours — I mean like getting medieval, hard-core, pass-rush work.” Key took to it immediately.
“That just showed you, I felt like he loved pass rush so much,” said Smith, an All-Pro with the Falcons in 1997. “And I loved it. That’s why we hit it off so great. He had the love.”
Smith would ask Key to name his favorite pass rushers of all time. Key would ask about rushers with whom Smith had played or coached like Reggie White, Von Miller and Robert Mathis. Watching video of those players with Smith, Key said, was particularly helpful.
“I got a lot out of that,” Key said. “Before, all I was looking at was, ‘OK, he used that move and got to the quarterback.’ When I looked at it with Chuck, it was more, ‘OK, this is the set the offensive tackle gave him. This is the move he used. This is why he used it. This is why he won.’
“It was a lot more knowledge of the game and learning how to study film rather than watching a guy get a bunch of sacks and not know why.”
At the NFL combine in March, Key ran an unimpressive time in the 40-yard dash (4.9 seconds). Smith scoffs at that being a measure of Key’s quickness off the edge. In pass rushing, says Smith, “the great ones win in 5 yards,” the area encompassing the rusher and the lineman he’s trying to beat.
“In that 5 yards, you have to have lateral movement, bends, change of direction, pivot, plant,” Smith said. “The great ones do all that. And Arden Key has all those qualities.”
At 6-foot-5, Key sets up in a front-loaded stance with his hips raised at about the same height as his shoulders. From there, he can stay low and try to beat his tackle around the edge with quickness or deploy one of a variety of pass-rushing moves.
Key displayed a few in oneon-one drills in training camp. Going against fellow rookie Brandon Parker, Key used his hands to knock away Parker’s and spun inside, leaving Parker frozen and facing forward as he chased after the stand-in quarterback. On another matchup, Key lined up against first-round pick Kolton Miller, faked an inside spin and blew past Miller into the backfield.
The Raiders have yet to see Key’s maneuvers in a game; he missed the preseason opener against Detroit last Friday after tweaking an ankle, but practiced this week and could make his debut Saturday against the Rams. Key said recently he enjoys experimenting with and putting his own twist on different moves, as well as the ingame chess match against opposing linemen.
“You might beat him on one set, but naturally, if he’s been in the league for a long time, he already knows as a rookie what your next move is,” Key said. “So I’ve got to think, ‘What’s my next move? What’s my next move after that?’ and put that as the second one.”
Physical ability was not the reason Key fell to the draft’s third round. In 2016, Key set the LSU season record with 12 sacks as a sophomore. But his junior year was rocky.
In February 2017, Key took a leave of absence from LSU for personal reasons. He had shoulder surgery that spring and missed the first two games of the season. He returned weighing 270 pounds, compared with his current listed weight of 238 pounds. Although the reason for Key’s leave was not made public, NFL Network reported Key had entered rehab for marijuana use.
In May, Key acknowledged that “off-the-field” issues led to his draft slide and stated his intent to “stay on the straight path” in the NFL. Key said the Raiders “set a plan” for him when he arrived, and he has formed a quick bond with defensive end Bruce Irvin, a fellow Atlanta native who also trained with Smith.
“We love Key,” head coach Jon Gruden said this month. “You go back two years ago and watch him at LSU, he’s as good an edge rusher as there is in the country. He struggled a little bit his last season in Baton Rouge, but Chuck Smith, his private coach in the offseason, sent us a lot of videos and kept us up to speed. There are some things this kid can do that are very special.”
Smith, who considers himself a mentor to Key, was candid when asked about Key’s 2017 drop-off.
“At the end of the day, he’s a grown man. He has to play the hand he deals himself,” Smith said. “He has a great hand right now. He’s done everything you can do to get back on track.
“He’s young, he’s a kid — but he’s in the big-boy game now. He has to do like everybody else. He has to be disciplined.”
Smith believes Key is capable of that. He also has another story to illustrate Key’s motivation:
One day, Key was at the Atlanta-area facility training at the same time as Robert Mathis, the former Indianapolis defensive end/linebacker and 2013 Defensive Player of the Year. Smith posted a Twitter video of Mathis working on a spin move. And Key, he says, replied with a clip of himself doing the same spin, writing: “Rob Mathis, I’m going to be doing your move better than you!”
“And this guy’s in the 12th grade, man,” Smith said. “I had to tell Arden, ‘Humble yourself, boy! This is the Defensive Player of the Year!’
“He’s like, ‘Man, I’m going to be there one day.’ ”