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Editor’s note: Here’s a re-post of our PFF Pro Bowl selections that were first announced in late December. Originally in separate articles (AFC, NFC), our choices for both teams are together here. In the end, as players were removed and replacements added, there were 66 that got PFF mentions and actually received tickets to Hawaii (though some will miss out due to injury or the Super Bowl). 

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So here it is, the one the players really want to see. No hype, no bias, just a simple acknowledgement that–on the field of play, for the first 14 games of 2011–they were among the best at their position. It’s not based on highlight reels and you get as much credit for playing well early as you do late (during the regular season, winning the first game counts the same in the standings as winning the last). Read the rest of this entry »

As we got deeper into the second half of this game, you just knew it was going to take a mistake from one of the offenses (or indeed, the special teams) to break the deadlock. So great was the defense’s stranglehold, it seemed we may be in for an even longer game than the one we got.

I’ll leave the Giants’ defense for my colleagues to pick up tomorrow, but the topic here is Justin Smith and just how New York went about trying to combat him. The truth is, they invested a lot to hold him in check which worked to begin with, but then, when they were left with no option but to leave him one-on-one, it was usually to their cost.

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For this game we decided to do the NFL equivalent of tracking an endangered species–we scouted the fullback and in Vonta Leach, one of the few players at that position who get any significant playing time.

It amazed me this year when Michael Robinson was named as the NFC’s first alternate; in part because he actually wasn’t very good as a blocker, but more to do with the fact he only played 22.8% of the Seahawks’ snaps. No fullback played more snaps than Leach (584) and with 52.6% of snaps, it may even be worth my while putting it all to paper. As it turned out, the Ravens game plan was so conservative that he ended up playing an awful lot more than his season average. Let’s have a look at how he did. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow. What a game and if you, like me, are pretty stoked after such a thrilling matchup, perhaps you’ll excuse some rather excited rhetoric in this report.

After staying on the defensive side of the game last week, I decided to look to the other side of the ball and after three and a half minutes of the first quarter was regretting my decision. On a sideline go route, Jimmy Graham, my “Focus Point” for the day, banged his head and left the field injured to various calls from the commentators about concussions and how he may not return. Was this the flaw in my plan?

As it turned out, Graham returned on the next drive and played a fairly pivotal role in what, at the moment at least, appears to be one of the best playoff games ever. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants’ tackles have struggled in pass protection all season–especially against speed rushers coming from the outside–and in the Falcons’ John Abraham, here was the most productive player fitting that description over the last three to four years.

As pure pass protectors, LT, David Diehl ranked 47th in our tackle rankings while RT, Kareem McKenzie, a guy whose fall from grace has been precipitous this year, ranked 49th. I mention them both because Abraham spends a lot of time on both sides of the line. He’s one of the few players who are equally adept at rushing from the left as from the right, as is evidenced by his stats from the regular season. He came from the left 28% of the time and picked up five sacks, five hits and nine hurries in 111 attempts, while on the 56% of plays coming from the right he was excellent, although slightly less productive, with five sacks, three hits and 23 hurries on 224 rushes.

Would these guys allow Eli Manning the time to throw or would he be on his back-foot all day. Let’s see how it turned out.
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For the second of these articles, what better way to complete the Saturday set of Wild Card games than by comparing and contrasting another defensive tackle going against an equally accomplished line. Ndamukong Suh hasn’t had the greatest of sophomore years, but here was an opportunity to live up to the hype by making plays against a Pro Bowl interior. The Lions may have come up short but how did Suh measure up?

This season the Lions coaching staff has deliberately cut down on Suh’s snaps. Presumably the plan here is to either allow him more energy later in the game, give other players a chance, extend his playing career, or more likely a combination of all three. In his rookie year he averaged 90% of all defensive snaps, but this year that has been reduced to 78%. Interestingly, that is very close to what he got in this game too (75%), playing almost all of those snaps at left defensive tackle. He was used on two occasions as a left defensive end, but not once on the right side.

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We’ve been pulling our hair out about this all season … how do we give you some great information you can’t get anywhere else just after the game finishes? For technical reasons we can’t start analysis until just after the game ends and then it’s around eight hours of hard data crunching before the information surfaces and another hour or so before we publish our Re-Focused articles.

We thought about giving you some quick hit stuff but frankly that’s not our style; we have lots of flaws at PFF but lack of substance isn’t one of them. We’re not going to give you, the hard core fan, less information than you deserve so we had an idea–how about giving you more? Why don’t we cut down on the width dramatically but go into more depth on a particular area of the game or matchup than we’ve done previously. We’ll use our top guys (or me in this case) to log just one part of play but in great detail and get it to you as soon after the game finishes as we can. Read the rest of this entry »

As passing records fell with the regularity of a Tim Tebow incompletion you could speculate that defenders in the 2011 season weren’t up to much. It’s true that some pass rushers struggled to get pressure and certain defensive backs had horrendous problems even getting close to receivers, but at the other end of the scale, things were pretty much as normal. The top end guys, the ones on this list, excelled to the same level as you would normally expect from the best players at their respective positions. So to be absolutely clear these are not default selections in a down year for defense; they are players that would have been at or close to these ranking after any season.

So after giving our definitive positions on Rookie of the Year and Offensive Player of the Year here are the ten best players from the defensive side of the game.

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As commentators Sam Rosen and Chad Pennington kept on telling us this was a good, hard-fought encounter where both teams played like they had a lot more on the line than pride. It was as if Fox were concerned you couldn’t work out for yourself if you were enjoying the game; let’s just reassure the people watching that football with nothing at stake can be more entertaining than watching Tim Tebow struggle to complete 25% of his throws, they said … without actually saying it of course.

Truthfully, this was far more to my taste with some outstanding play on both sides to discuss and extrapolate into next year. When the dust of this season settles, the offseason is done and we are looking forward to Kick Off 2012, will what we saw here be far more salient than what was transpiring in Mile High?

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So this is a game that the Packers didn’t care about; they’d simply rest their big names, run the ball at every opportunity, just take the loss and move on? Yeah right.

Matt Flynn is a free agent in February and he and the coaches had other ideas about giving up a 22 year home winning streak against the Lions. Instead they gave him the opportunity to shop his wares to all the NFL teams struggling at the QB position and condemn the Lions to the playoff gig no one wants; away to the offensive juggernaut of the New Orleans Saints. Matthew Stafford together with Calvin Johnson played about as well as you can but still came up short in a game that had plenty of interest for interested parties and neutral fans alike. Here’s what I thought of some of the key players:

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