Ten IDP Stats You Need To Know After Week 7
After sitting through the Jaguars vs Patriots game this week this column is all about respect and love for good defenses. With that said, hopefully, your team is smashing it so far, but that’s not good enough. With IDP you have to keep outworking your opponents.
1 Jihad Ward has rushed the passer on 95% of his snaps
Ward has played 149 snaps and remarkably 141 of them were pass rush snaps.
Now obviously the Vikings see him as a specialist but the whole point of football is you don’t know what’s coming. So even if the Vikings are trying to only send him out to go after the QB they’ve been astonishingly good at understanding when those snaps are coming.
Generally, teams are nowhere near that good at being able to predict whether a pass or a run is coming. For example, if we take every single interior lineman with as many total snaps or more than Ward (there are 86 other players who qualify) the average pass rush rate is 56%. And no other player has over 72%. So Ward’s 95% is truly uncanny.
2 TJ Watt is the least efficient pass rushing edges in the NFL
This was flagged in last week’s column, but it’s become even more pronounced this week. As the chart below shows you TJ Watt has been the least efficient edge in the NFL at turning pass rush volume into pressure. Which is just utterly bizarre.
We can hope and assume this turns around and he starts to look much better in this metric, but right now it’s worryingly odd.
3 Zaire Franklin and Quincy Williams are at opposite ends of the assist spectrum
Bear in mind that this data is from PFF. When you look at local stat crew data assist rates are notoriously uneven, but this is from a single, double-checked methodology. Even so, when you’re dealing with large sample sizes, you’re going to get some anomalies. And depending on definitions about 150 LBs have played defensive snaps in the NFL this season.
As per the chart below, Zaire Franklin (31 assists from 494 snaps at 6.2%) and Quincy Williams (6 assists from 457 snaps at 1.3%) look wildly different. When we see things like this the instinct is that there’s some underlying cause. These players are just especially ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at recording assisted tackles. But that’s not true. As we always say, tackles are not something a defender does. They’re something that happens to him. Obviously, it has an effect on IDP scoring though. Annoying eh?
4 Denzel Ward continues to be the best ballhawk in the 2024 NFL
Think back to how much of the Browns conversation this year has been about Deshaun Watson. And how much of it has been about one of their stud players doing well.
OK, Ward has not been great. His missed tackles have been a real problem. But any defensive coordinator in the NFL will sacrifice a handful of messed-up tackles for two handfuls of drive-ending PDs.
5 Jared Verse has a missed tackle problem
The Rams selected Verse at 19th overall and had a huge need for an impact pass-rusher. He’s done well with 27 pressures from 142 pass rush snaps (19% pressure rate is well above 13% edge average).
But he’s also had a real problem with missed tackles. Above we talked about that being OK. But that’s for corners. For edges, it’s an entirely different thing. You expect these guys to make tackles much more consistently.
And the chart shows that Verse is out on his own. It’s not as simple as “rookies don’t tackle so well” or there are other dots up in his range. This is an individual issue for him.
6 The Panthers have now had five LBs play over 40 snaps in a game this season
Shaq Thompson and Josey Jewell started the season for the team, but Trevin Wallace, Claudin Cherelus and now Chandler Wooten have all had to play too.
Yes, this Panthers defense is short of talent. The lack of quality is a huge part of why they’re the worst defense in the NFL.
But injury rates have also been terrible. These exist for all NFL teams, with over 50% of defensive starts missing games each year, but some teams are always hot harder than others. The Panthers had eight defenders play over 50 snaps in week one. Of those only one (Xavier Woods) has played in every game since then.
7 The Panthers are the worst pass-rushing defense in the NFL
As above, injuries are (probably) not the Panther’s fault. The lack of good players absolutely is on them.
The following chart shows just how ineffective they’ve been at generating pressure on the QB. They’ve recorded significantly fewer pressures than all but one other team (the Titans) and have the worst pressure rate by far.
There are only two ways to come across as good pass rushers in the NFL. Draft them in the top 20 or so picks or pay them a fortune in free agency. Anything else is a low-percentage shot.
The Panthers have drafted two edges in the first round this century. Julius Peppers in 2002 and Brian Burns in 2019. They’ve drafted three interior linemen in round one over that period (Star Lotulelei, Vernon Butler, Derrick Brown), but clearly, under different regimes, the Panthers have underinvested in pass rush over time. And this is what that looks like. They are utterly desperate for a pass-rusher talent injection.
8 The Broncos are allowing just 4.4 yards per play
The rest of the NFL is averaging 5.4. No other team bar the Broncos is under 4.8.
As always people will talk about the quarterback and the head coach, but this Broncos defense is looking and playing great.
9 The Lions defense is allowing 3.7 first downs per game via penalty
To put that into context, the average team allows about 19 first downs per game.
So, the Lions are giving up an extra 21% of extra first downs through penalties.
For the record, the rest of the NFL is averaging 1.7 penalty first downs per game. The disciplined Steelers are only allowing 0.9.
10 With Aidan Hutchinson the Lions were averaging 20.6 pressures per game. Without him, they managed 15
That’s 103 pressures in their first five games. And 15 this week.
15 pressures in a game are not bad at all. It’s almost exactly the NFL average. But with Hutchinson in amazing form, they were a full third better off than the NFL average. And they appear to have come back down to Earth with a bump.
The Lions are a lot more than a one-man team, but last year, they were a really good offense with an average defense that cost them in the playoffs. They are looking quite a lot like that this season, too, and even more so without their best defender.
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