Neil’s NFL Daily: June 4, 2013

It’s a much shorter and more conversational edition of my daily today as I sit at Heathrow airport awaiting my flight to NYC on the first leg of a 10-day tour of some of the OTA’s going on across the country in the next two weeks. To be fair, much is meeting with customers about their requirements for next year — so don’t expect too much by way of inside information — but please know I’ll pass on whatever I can.

Tuesday, June 4th 

Sedrick Ellis Doing the Rounds

A quick glance at our grading from the last five years will tell you we think Ellis has been a real bust as the seventh overall selection in 2008. But here’s the thing about the defensive tackle: while he’s never come close to living up to that draft position, he’s never been a liability either. While he’s graded slightly negatively in every season since his rookie year (where he actually showed some excellent pass rush skills) he’s never once rated less than a -3.3 and not below -2.2 for nearly two years. To some this may be damning with faint praise but I can see him being a serviceable rotational player at the veteran minimum and who knows, in a new environment maybe some of that old ability to get to the QB re-emerges.

Fred Evans vs. Letroy Guion

In a recent piece by Tom Pelissero for 1500ESPN.com it came out that the coaches keep telling Leslie Frazier that Evans deserves an opportunity to compete for the starting nose tackle role. It’s a question we’ve asked at PFF many times: why is Evans behind the far less productive Guion? In 2010 Guion did a decent enough job but was overtaken in 2011 and then, last year, Evans left him trailing by a large margin. With broadly equivalent Pass Rushing Productivity ratings, Evans work in the run game was superb; we graded him at a +14.7 including the playoffs against Guion’s unimpressive -9.4. His display in the Wild Card game against the Packers was particularly good — in 25 snaps he managed five tackles, all of them stops and rated a gaudy +5.9.

Thank You Readers

Finally, just a quick thank you to Ryan Riddle for his Twitter poll regarding that community’s favorite NFL site. I’m grateful to those voting and rest assured we will continue our quest to bring you even closer to what actually happens on the field of NFL play. Although this is maybe a little premature, perhaps it's a good time to announce one of our intentions for the coming year…

I’m still a little cautious as things can change (in other words, don’t completely hold us to this) but our intention for 2013 is to also grade every preseason game. As we say every year, these games do come with a very big “buyer beware” tag but none-the-less, if viewed correctly, they can provide significant insight into some of the lower-tier players.

Other editions of Neil’s NFL Daily can be found HERE

Follow Neil on Twitter: @PFF_Neil