The team handed Luvu one of the largest contracts — a three-year deal worth up to $36 million with incentives — during its offseason spending spree, signaling faith he could help establish its new foundation.
“Frankie just jumps off the tape — the way he plays, his play style, his mindset, his mentality,” General Manager Adam Peters said in March. “… I didn’t know much about Frankie … other than watching him play and saying, ‘I want that guy on my team.’ But you do research, and all his teammates absolutely love him. He’s a great leader.”
As Peters and others in Washington quickly learned, Luvu is hardly just an “effort” or locker-room glue guy, euphemisms that at times seem to diminish a player’s ability. The 27-year-old American Samoa native has a varied skill set, with the size (6-foot-3, 236 pounds), length and athleticism to make him a commodity.
“He always shows up on tape,” said Greg Cosell, a longtime analyst and producer for NFL Films. “He can do everything. … I think he’s one of the most overlooked really good linebackers in the league who can pretty much do whatever you ask him to do.”
And in his seventh year in the NFL, Luvu believes he’s just getting started.
“Oh yeah, I’m still young,” he said during a Zoom interview this offseason. “I don’t count myself as a vet yet.”
Following the ‘Polynesian pipeline’
When the Commanders signed Luvu and made him a foundational piece of their defense, Coach Dan Quinn lauded his versatility, a trait he has valued from his time with the stars of the Seattle Seahawks’ “Legion of Boom” defense to his years with Dallas Cowboys unicorn linebacker Micah Parsons.
Finding another Parsons or K.J. Wright wasn’t the goal. But in Luvu, Quinn may have landed a coveted Swiss Army knife that can plug the run, give receivers fits in coverage, create havoc while blitzing and resemble a human wrecking ball — with control. Or, as Quinn calls him, “an impact hitter.”
“And our team needs more hitters,” Quinn added.
Quinn has loaded Washington’s roster, especially the back end, with versatile defenders, including safety Jeremy Chinn, defensive back Quan Martin and rookie nickelback Mike Sainristil.
Luvu reacts like a skill player, with the force of a defensive end and the want-to of a special-teamer trying to earn a roster spot. Should Washington need it, he might even have the background to jump in as an emergency kicker; he was on American Samoa’s under-17 national soccer team and was the kicker for his high school football team in addition to playing safety and linebacker.
“Frankie was a DB by trade,” a Joe Salave’a, the former NFL defensive tackle who recruited and coached him at Washington State. “When you project a Poly kid, it’s rare that you get a kid that’s remained a skill position kid. So with Frankie, he continued to get bigger and better, so he ended up being a linebacker. The kid is ferocious. He arrives to the ball with bad intention, and it wasn’t hard to spot him on the field.”
Salave’a, now at the University of Miami, played eight seasons in the NFL, including his last three with Washington. When he turned to coaching, he helped Mike Leach rebuild Washington State’s program by recruiting a number of athletes who, like himself, were from American Samoa, a collection of seven islands and atolls in the South Pacific that has just a few flights each week to the United States. Luvu became one of the more prominent athletes to come through the Polynesian pipeline, as it became known.
He credits Salave’a for much of his success. As a 17-year-old, Luvu left American Samoa with a single suitcase for Pullman, Wash., to play for the Cougars. The nearly 5,500-mile trip was his first to the mainland.
“Coach Joe Salave’a played a huge part in that,” Luvu said. “I feel like a lot of kids, man, when you leave the island, you’re trying to get that structure and somebody that could pull you in the line and have you going in the right direction. … So Coach Joe was that kind of parent. … I had offers from other colleges, but I wanted to build something up there in Washington State.”
After three seasons with the New York Jets and another three with the Carolina Panthers, Luvu became a free agent again this offseason, and Salave’a again served as one of his guides. He urged Luvu to “capitalize on his opportunity” and knew the linebacker would be a good match with Quinn.
Salave’a and Quinn became friends nearly two decades earlier, when Quinn worked alongside Dick Tomey on the San Francisco 49ers’ defensive staff. Tomey coached Salave’a at Arizona and gave him his first coaching job at San José State.
“If you are focused, if you’re locked in and if you show up with consistency and continue to work even when you don’t receive immediate results, you’re going to have an opportunity [on Quinn’s team],” Salave’a said. “I think Frankie is a great match for his new head coach.”
A veteran who’s still learning
Luvu doesn’t believe he’s a true NFL veteran despite playing six seasons and working his way up from being a free agent after going undrafted out of college to earning his keep as a special-teamer to proving his mettle as a defensive starter.
He may never consider himself one of the “old heads,” as he calls them, because he will always feel there’s more to learn and new people to learn from.
Salave’a taught his players to be sponges on the field and off — to listen and be willing to receive instruction and then act on it. In Carolina, Luvu often picked the brains of linebackers Thomas Davis, Luke Kuechly and Shaq Thompson, absorbing lessons from film or by studying their routines.
Among Luvu’s most prominent teachers was Kevin Greene, the late Hall of Famer who parlayed his 160 career sacks into a second career as a linebackers coach for the Green Bay Packers and then the Jets. Greene, Luvu said, preached the finer details of being a professional.
“One thing he told me coming in as a rookie was about the law of attraction: What you put in is what you’re going to get out,” Luvu said. “And he was very hard on how you eat, how you sleep, how you train. Everything will be affected, and it will come to light when it’s time. So that’s like my motto. That’s what I live by.
“There’s numerous times in practice where, if I were to do this certain technique, he would be like, ‘All right now, rook, get your grill in there!’” Luvu added. “We’d be watching tape at the end of practice — I watched extra tape with him — and he’s doing his workout in the back with his little cardio and he’d just toss me the remote and I’m going through [Ryan] Kerrigan’s film, who is now one of our assistant coaches.”
Kerrigan, Washington’s all-time sacks leader, joined the Commanders’ staff in 2022 as an assistant defensive line coach. He was one of the few assistants retained by Quinn, who paired him with linebackers coach Ken Norton Jr.
“I was literally just with [Kerrigan] before I came home and got on the film a little bit,” Luvu said, “and he was helping me out, and I told him, ‘Bro, this is crazy that I was sitting with Kevin Greene watching you and now you’re coaching me.’ It’s just full circle. I got goose bumps.”
‘His energy is contagious’
When Thompson went down with a season-ending injury, Luvu took over inside and assumed the green dot on his helmet, given to the defense’s chief communicator. He had played inside a bit in college, but playing the “Mike” in the NFL made him the quarterback of the defense, responsible for relaying the plays to his teammates and ensuring everyone was on the same page.
To get up to speed, Luvu spent even more time watching film with Thompson and Panthers safeties Vonn Bell and Xavier Woods, including on their days off.
“That’s when I started putting myself in Shaq’s shoes and I’m like, ‘Oh, these guys, they put a lot on their plate with what they got to go through,’” Luvu recalled. “But I think moving to that spot and really seeing the whole picture helped me to be more versatile. You can just plug me anywhere.”
Over the past two seasons, Luvu was the only linebacker with more than 200 tackles (he had 236), at least 10 sacks (he had 12.5) and three forced fumbles. He also had nine passes defended and a 33-yard pick-six.
In Washington, he will be used in multiple spots and in multiple ways. But alongside “Mike” linebacker Bobby Wagner, Luvu’s pass rushing talents figure to be used even more.
Glimpses of that were on display during the Commanders’ offseason practices, when defensive coordinator Joe Whitt Jr. preached to his players a mindset of “arriving violently” and creating a unit that will “feed the studs,” finding ways to help its playmakers excel.
Luvu, as his new teammates attested during their spring workouts, is one of those studs.
“Man, his energy is contagious,” Wagner said. “… He’s a guy you can’t not notice when he’s out there.”
