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Neil's NFL Daily: May 20, 2013

Friday and the weekend brought a few items of note, including the anticipated Dwight Freeney signing by San Diego. I commented on this on the back of Melvin Ingram’s injury last week so will only just reiterate, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on the 3-4 part of the equation. Another pass rusher in the news was Seattle’s Bruce Irvin and I’ll take a moment later to go through the implications of that, but not before I provide you with some information on one of my favourite topics — quarterbacks playing under pressure.

 

Monday, May 20th

Quarterbacks Responsible for Taking Sacks

I had a mini-glut of correspondence last week on quarterbacks who brought the most sacks on themselves or, to put it another way, those players who took too long to throw and got taken down or simply ran straight into a defender when other options were available.

Four seconds is the time over which we say the QB takes responsibility, but this excludes instances where they were pressured within that limit, had to take evasive action with no opportunity to throw the ball away, but got taken down after it.

As requested, here is the full list of “QB Responsible Sacks” which includes the playoffs (minimum 300+ drop-backs), and to add additional value I’ve also included the number of hits and pressures which we have logged as being down to that player too.

 

Quarterback Responsible Sacks

[table id=862 /]

 

A word of warning though, being near the top of this list isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Certain players, like Aaron Rodgers or Russell Wilson, have a penchant for hanging in under pressure until the last second and beyond, and weigh the risk of the sack against the reward of the play.

What I thought would be interesting was to see if that holds any weight by looking at only plays in which the QB took over four seconds. Would some of the guys at the top of the list also be those who did the best? As QB rating is a blunt instrument at the best of times (never mind on smaller sample sets), though I included it, on this occasion I ranked players using our un-normalized ratings per drop-back.

 

Quarterback Rank When Throwing After 4 Seconds (minimum 20 drop-backs)

[table id=863 /]

My first reaction when seeing the results was to think there will be some people out there asking, “is this just another way to show Mark Sanchez at the bottom of a list?”. OK — I get it — but making him look good is a lot trickier than it sounds, and not something I’d attempt at home without an adult auditor supervising operations.

On a serious note, what this suggests is, of the Top 5, Jake Locker, Wilson and Rodgers seem to have a reasonable balance of taking sacks on extended plays and making good things happen, while Jay Cutler and Andy Dalton may wish to reconsider their strategy.

 

Bruce Irvin Suspended Four Games

Another day, another Adderall suspension in Seattle. With all the pass-rushing firepower the Seahawks pulled in, this doesn’t have quite the impact of Arizona losing Daryl Washington for four games, but it will hurt. Michael Bennett has a torn rotator cuff and, while he should be fine this season, it’s difficult to predict the outcome. Chris Clemons is questionable for the season opener after tearing his ACL in the Wild Card Game and that puts a real onus on Cliff Avril to get back to his superlative form of 2010. After grading +23.7 that season he slipped to +5.9 in 2011 and -0.4 last year.

Many laughed at the Seahawks' selection of Irvin in the first round last year because he is a “pure” pass rusher, and it’s true that when Clemons was injured and Irvin had to play more against the run he was often manhandled. That said, as a pass rusher he was probably better than advertised, although he did wear down toward the end of the year. His Pass Rushing Productivity rating of 10.5 (42 QB disruptions, 324 rushes during the regular season) was good enough for seventh among 4-3 ends.

On the basis he was going to “kick-on” from a good, if not great, rookie campaign this is something Seattle could certainly have done without.

 

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

 

Follow Neil on Twitter: @PFF_Neil

 

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