Match Ups

The season came to a close Sunday with playoff implications in a number of games along with a slew of intriguing and high-caliber matchups. In our final Marquee Matchups column of the regular season, we take a look at a face-off between this year’s standout wide receiver and a corner who has played better than a frankly astronomical stat line would suggest.

Calvin Johnson is a legitimate MVP and Offensive Player of the Year candidate, while in the wake of this game, Tramon Williams gave up more yards in coverage than any other cornerback in football according to our coverage stats. After relinquishing 178 yards on eight catches in this Wild West shootout, Williams roared past Devin McCourty to the “top”; giving up 1034 yards on the season, 30 more than the Patriots’ corner. Williams is no slouch and has proven himself over the last two years a solid corner who allows Charles Woodson to play a more freelance role for the Packers, but how did Johnson manage to rip his coverage to shreds in this game? Let’s take a look at it target by target.

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After an absolutely spectacular start to the 2011 NFL season in which he brought the term shutdown corner brought back into relevance, Darrelle Revis experienced, by his own high standards, somewhat of a mid-season lull. Revis was still among the very best corners in the NFL during that stretch, but some receivers (principally Buffalo’s Stevie Johnson) at least made him look human.

This week Revis restated his supremacy as the top corner in the league by posting arguably his best performance of the entire season. Going up against one of the best and deepest receiver corps in the league and a quarterback playing some of the best football of his career in the shape of Eli Manning, he produced another astonishing game. Read the rest of this entry »

Nationally televised games offer players a chance to raise their profile with a big performance in front of the entire football nation. Situational players and those from off-the-radar teams have the chance to grab the limelight and give their name a much needed boost.

This Monday night, in a statement game for the San Francisco 49ers, their first-round pick Aldon Smith did just that, exhibiting in one game what he has been doing all season for the 49ers as a situational pass rusher. As with other rookies converting to a 3-4 defense, Smith’s rookie season has been limited to playing in nickel defenses as a pass rusher. This has allowed the 49ers to make excellent use of his phenomenal pass-rushing talents without putting excess pressure on him to learn an entire defensive playbook in order to contribute in all facets of the base defense. Read the rest of this entry »

The Denver Broncos are stealing the headlines around the country right now and rightly so. On the back of a series of outstanding performances by their defense and some clutch drives led by Tim Tebow, the Broncos are riding the crest of a wave towards a playoff spot that seemed completely improbable earlier this season.

The only real shame with the whole Tebow craze currently is that some really good football is being missed with the attention centered squarely on the quarterback and his individual merits. In this past week’s Bears vs. Broncos tilt, a matchup between a blocker whose career marks have shown him to be one of the better left tackles in football and a defender who has consistently been among the game’s best defensive ends went almost completely unnoticed. Read the rest of this entry »

He has been the story of the second half of the season so far; a quarterback willing his team to win without contributing as a passer. It has purists furious that a quarterback who can’t consistently hit simple throws is being seen as revolutionary player, while many neutral fans are simply enjoying the ride as Tim Tebow defies what many see as logic and continues to win.

That was until this week, as against the Minnesota Vikings he was held in check as a runner and forced to make the difference as a passer.

The Vikings made a concerted effort to curtail Tebow’s running threat and it worked; he only carried the ball on one designed run outside of his kneel-down ahead of the game-winning field goal. What this heavy run defense effort opened up, though, was deep passing against man coverage and a single-high safety. When teams choose to clamp down on Tebow the runner, these are the throws that are likely to be presented to Tebow the passer. The question has always been: can he make the throws? Read the rest of this entry »

Ordinarily in our Marquee Matchups column we take a look at three of the more intriguing one-on-one matchups that the week’s action threw up. However, this week allowed us to review the matchup between Darrelle Revis and the man who earlier this season put up more yards in Revis’ coverage than any individual receiver has managed in the last four seasons against him, Stevie Johnson.

Back in that Week 9 encounter, Johnson amassed an impressive – for Revis’ coverage – 84 yards on three receptions. In the return game this week at the new Meadowlands Stadium, Johnson put up 75 yards … the second highest mark on Revis over the last four seasons.  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a short week for teams this week and a short week for us here at PFF to review all the action that Week 11 brought us. Yup, it’s the annual fun of Turkey Day football. But before we get excited with anticipating two mouthwatering contests – something that Thanksgiving has lacked in recent seasons – let’s take a look back at some of the best matchups from Week 11.

This was a week that brought us some interesting matchups in the trenches, with some unexpected outcomes, as teams who were teetering on the brink, or even some that had fallen away, rose up one more time to re-establish themselves and keep their playoff hopes alive for at least one more week. Read the rest of this entry »

Every team in the NFL has now passed the turn and is heading down the home stretch – after this weekend every team will be done with their bye weeks and will be non-stop to the playoffs. The season is heating up and so are the one-on-one matchups on the field. Whether it be on the line, in the defensive backfield, or in the minds of a rookie quarterback and a veteran defender, the games are starting to mean more and as we go deeper into the season, these one-on-one’s may decide not only a game here and there but potentially a team’s fate as well.

This week, we take a look back to emerging stars from the last two seasons, one veteran wide receiver who is finally putting it all together, and a second-year corner staking his claim as one of the best in the league. We take a look at a rookie quarterback who, for the second time in the month, was put in his place by the combination of a veteran defensive coach and a wily veteran defender. Finally, we wind the clock all the way back to the first Thursday night game and one of the worst beatings you are ever likely to see – a rush end devastating a backup tackle who was left vulnerable to such a beating by his coaching staff.

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Week nine provided us with some classic contest that have been desperately lacking in the last few weeks. With teams still trying to find where they stand, early season front runners falling away and teams heating up after slow starts, the battles that inspired this article were lacking. That led this column to become a weekly diary of the worst beatings handed out the past Sunday. This week though, a change, some quality back and forth encounters.

There were some true marquees matchups out wide at receiver this week.  We could have filled this column with matchups between wide receivers and cornerbacks alone but for the fact we had the little matter of our top rated pass rusher and top rated pass protector going head to head.

So what’s in store this week? We’ll take a look at a Bills receiver taking more yards from Darrelle Revis than any individual receiver in the last three seasons. Then we’re heading to Pittsburgh for a physical matchup between a receiver and a corner that encapsulated that entire game. Lastly we have that aforementioned mouthwatering matchup between our top rated pass rusher, finally seeing the snaps he deserves, and our top rated pass protecting tackle.

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At a time of year when folks get all wrapped up in pumpkins, trick-or-treating, and “scary” costumes, the gridiron absorbed that atmosphere this weekend as we saw some ghoulish and garish individual performances – more than we can highlight in this column, but we’ll do our best.

Some of those that failed to make the cut: a nightmare six-penalty display from Chargers’ left tackle Marcus McNeill, Tim Tebow’s sub 50% completion percentage, and Barry Richardson’s abysmal display of run blocking on Monday night. And, if those are some of the performances not to make the cut, there must’ve been some really intriguing horror shows on display this week.

We take a look at a corner who will head back to Arizona with a recurring nightmare from giving up the same catch over and again on Sunday. Next up is a rookie tackle squaring off with a defensive end who posts the best game of his career. Then we’ll close with an unwelcome trip north of the border for one Washington Redskin.

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