Girod Street End Zone

Claude Coupee
Lead Correspondent

Yes, many of us were somewhere between puzzled and devastated when we all heard the name “Patrick Robinson” a few nights ago during the first round of the NFL draft.  It wasn’t quite like when that guy came into your office to tell you the Challenger exploded, or OJ was acquitted, but still.

And it may well be, as rumored, that we would love to have taken TCU’s Jerry Hughes, a fine pass-rushing prospect, the one thing this defense lacked last year — a true pass-rush threat off the edge that other teams would have to account for.

But by way of perspective, up in Philadelphia Eagles country, their fans were puzzled when a team that had just traded away arguably its best all-around veteran cornerback for a couple of mid-round picks and some magic beans took a bunch of young pass rushers (three in the first six picks) but no corners worth discussing.   Their largely successful coach was heard to say that a great pass rush makes up for all that corner stuff pretty well, you know.

And I like Andy Reid, but I just got to thinking…..O RLY?  Is that true?  Or is this one of those “offense sells tickets, defense wins ballgames” or “baseball is 90% pitching” or “they don’t play defense in the NBA like they do in college” loads of bullshit that people have just repeated for years without thinking?

You know us.  We had to find out.

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Got to thinking that no one had a better pass defense than the Jets last year, and I didn’t remember them as big sack monsters, hardly the New York Sack Exchange of yore.  More like Darrell Revis, and an over-the-counter market. And the Saints pass D, despite the injuries, was top-shelf as well, with two great young corners and a fine free safety, but without that pass rusher it seems we so needed two weeks ago.

Pass rush or great coverage?  Pressure-forced INTs, or coverage sacks?  Goddamn it, is it the chicken or the egg??!!??

My favorite stat for pass defense is opposing passer rating allowed.  Oddly, while I don’t entirely trust it as a measure of quarterback skill, given that the QB has to rely on a line to block, and WRs to run the right routes and catch the ball, it’s an overall pretty good measure of a team’s passing attack and, conversely, how well the pass is defensed.

On the other hand, I couldn’t come up with a stat for pass rush besides “sacks” [tm -- Deacon Jones].  Even Football Outsiders doesn’t have much more than that.

So we looked at the top 10 sack teams in 2009, to see where their overall opponent passer rating ranked (the OPR is in parentheses, didn’t bother with sack totals), figuring that the teams with the best sack totals would have, on balance, the better, if not the best, OPRs:

1.  Minnesota (27)
2.  Pittsburgh (15)
3.  Miami (19)
4.  Philadelphia (11)
5.   San Francisco (9)
6.  Arizona (10)
7.  Dallas (16)
8.  Cleveland (24)
9.  Washington (18)
10. Denver (8)

….with an average ranking of 15.7, thus the average pass defense of the top 10 sack teams would have ranked, well, right about the league average, 32 teams, you come in 15.7th, hey, do the math, right?  Of the top 10 sack teams, not a single on had a pass defense in the top seven in the league?  But I thought the key was having a good pass rush?  Is there some coincidence that all these teams have particularly lousy secondaries?

Even if that’s strange, let’s go the other way.  The best pass defenses by OPR should have the best sacks, right?  (League rank in sacks in parentheses.)

1.  NYJets (20)
2.  Buffalo (20 – we had to break some ties, there were 5 teams b/t 18-22 with the same number of sacks)
3.  SAINTS (14)
4.  Green Bay (11)
5.  Carolina (23)
6.  Baltimore (20)
7.  Cincinnati (16)
8.  Denver (10)
9.  San Fran (5)
10.  Arizona (6)

….with an average of 14.5.   Hmmm.  League average, or roughly so.  Seems like having a monster pass rush wasn’t so critical for the better pass defenses.  Not a lot of big sack teams had great pass defenses, and the OPR teams actually had higher average sack totals than the sack teams has OPR totals.  Could it be that what really happens is that great coverage is the way to start, and the pass rush comes later?

Because we don’t need sleep between midnight and 2 am on weeknights, we did 2008 and 2007 as well.  In 2008, the top 10 sack teams average OPR league rank was 12.7, and the top 10 OPR teams average sack rank was 13.0.  For 2007, it swung back the other way again, with the sack teams OPR at 11.0 and the OPR sack rank at 10.3. 

While I think overall a stronger coefficient like 2007 indicates some link between sacks and pass defense, the fact that the OPRs teams raise the sack totals more than the other way around, clearly these numbers, FWIW, do not indicate that pass rush is a primary driver of how good your pass defense will be.  Maybe the new key to pass defense isn’t so much building talent at the rush end, it’s finding ways to make the QB hang on to the ball for longer and longer.

Look, the game has changed a lot since the “pass rush” theory probably came out in the 1970s or 1980s.  Back in the old days of seven step drops and lots more one on one coverage, it made some sense that if you gave a QB too much time, eventually the WR would lose the DB, and you’d get cooked.  Maybe now, since the birth of the West Coast offense, there’s much more of emphasis on getting the ball out quickly, and the only way you’re getting to the quarterback is if you can take away his targets for long enough for a rush to have effect. 

In other words, sacks you can manufacture by blitzing.  Good coverage, well, unless you want to play the whole game in nickel and dime packages, good luck to you unless you’ve got the talent back there.  The Dome Patrol teams had as good a pass rush as anybody, but when they got up against good offenses that would max protect, they gave up points, plain and simple.

We’re sure there’s some stuff not taken into account here, like who’s getting there with the front four and who’s needing elaborate schemes (although we note that Minnesota’s vaunted front four, which got most of its sacks last year, fronted a truly mediocre pass defense that cost them home-field advantage down the stretch with terrible losses at Arizona and Chicago), but if nothing else, if I’m drafting and it’s down to “great corner versus great pass rusher,” right now give me the corner.

As usual, this analysis proves….nothing, but doesn’t it at least indicate that maybe too much blind emphasis is put on the belief that the pass rush is the mission-critical aspect of pass defense?   Or at least decouple them a little?

And if you’re looking for who else thinks like we do, look no further than those same Jets, who already had Darrell Revis and the league’s top pass D.  So what do they do after the season?  Trade for Antonio Cromartie…and with the 29th pick in the first round draft Kyle Wilson.  Another cornerback.

Look, in the last two years Tracy Porter missed 15 games  and Jabari Greer missed 13, Randall Gay (not a starting corner he) 28 in the last five, and Michael Malcolm Jenkins just doesn’t have the hips to turn and run with people like an NFL cornerback. 

So say hello to new Saints cornerback  Patrick Robinson.  And do so with a smile.

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As far as other draft thoughts, if you want to be an optimist, in taking the second-rated center in Matt Tennant and a no later than mid-second round OT in Charles Brown, we have probably locked up the OL in front of Brees through 2014, assuming we keep Jahri Evans and Carl Nicks in the fold.  With Brees safe and secure through the rest of his prime, and three young cornerbacks (Robinson, Porter, Greer) and Michael Malcolm Jenkins in the secondary, the team has tremendous leeway in a lot of other areas in future FA signings, trades and drafts.  

All the other positions, you can make do, but you can never have enough good OL and CB if you want a deep playoff run.   In the playoffs, the other good teams are like water and find the weakest, lowest point and pound through it.  If you can protect your quarterback and make the other team work down the field for its points, you go into every NFL game with a good chance to win.

I know that I should be screaming about us drafting a TE in the third round, but I guess I’ve decided to enjoy the heroin.  Those measurables are pretty tantalizing.  If you are worried if he can develop or not, in his first year of football since freshman year of high school, he scored five touchdowns, admittedly on only 17 catches. 

That’s a lot of progress for a guy essentially just learning to put on pads, and gives me a lot more comfort than if he was coming straight from the basketball court.  Still, as the Goat noted, with DEs Everson Griffen and Corey Wooton still on the draft board, if you wanted to reach….ahhh, let’s move on.

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Though the draft is done, I suspect the team is not, as rebuilding teams, and teams that don’t know exactly what they’re doing, are going to release some quality DL and LB veterans in the next two months as we head into camp.  So fret not.  The 2010 season has begun, and we’re right where we left off, clutching the Lombardi trophy and out hunting for another one.

WHO DAT.

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2010 at 1:40 am and is filed under The New Orleans Saints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.