Isaiah Simmons is taking flight in Arizona

After a rough start, Isaiah Simmons is trending in the right direction.

The first seven games of Isaiah Simmons NFL career did not go the way that he planned for it too. He was seeing very little playing time on defense and people around the league were starting to use the “B” word – bust.

Over those first seven weeks, Simmons logged just 83 total snaps on defense for the Arizona Cardinals – in Week 7 he saw just five plays on defense.

Most people were highly confused as to what was going on with Isaiah Simmons and the Arizona Cardinals. Was he not grasping the defensive playbook, were the Cardinals unable to use his talents, or was it a combination of both?

What we do know, is over the last three weeks of the NFL season, no rookie is playing better on defense than Simmons is for the Cardinals.

Isaiah Simmons has exploded over the last three weeks.

Simmons has logged 109 of the 180 defensive plays for the Cardinals in the last three weeks. He has accumulated 18 tackles, three tackles for loss, and two QB hits. In Thursday night’s loss to the Seahawks, Simmons led the Cardinals with 10 tackles, two tackles for loss, and a QB hit.

Earlier in the season when Simmons was not getting much playing time, Arizona defensive coordinator Vance Joseph estimated that Isaiah missed more than 1,200 reps because of the non-existent offseason due to COVID-19.

When you are missing that many reps that can make the NFL learning curve that much steeper and it clearly did for Simmons.

As he becomes more comfortable in Joseph’s defense and earns the complete trust of his teammates and position coach, we will see Simmons flourish as he did in 2019 in the Tigers uniform.

Like every college football program, Clemson has produced its fair share of first-round busts, but we can confidently say that Isaiah Simmons will not be among them. He will be a Pro-Bowl player for years to come out in the desert.