What is up with Hendrickson?

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(01-30-2023, 08:00 PM)BRM13 Wrote: Fair points.  Two things.  First, i was answering the OP about whether Hendrickson's production had declined.  My answer is it depends on which type.  Sacks yes, pressures not so much.  

Second, I don't think sacks are unnecessary or that pressures = sacks.  Sacks are clearly better, just like homeruns are better than singles.  Your chart says sacks are roughly 4 times better than a pressure.  Would you rather have 5 pressures or 1 sack?  Your chart says 5 pressures.  Hendrickson gets a lot of pressures, so he is still being pretty productive.  Of course, he'd be a lot more valuable if he turned a few more of those pressures into sacks.  Just like Pete Rose was productive, but he would have been more valuable if he'd turned a few of those singles into homeruns.

As Killer Goose noted above, sacks are correlated with pressures.  His numbers said that across the league about 17% of pressures turn into sacks, IIRC.  So, it wouldn't shock me if it was also true (I'm too lazy to look it up) that the #1 pressure team was playing the #2 pressure team in the Super Bowl.  

Nah, "all pressure" are all pressures including sacks. The "hit & hurried" is all pressure without sacks. So it's roughly 5.75 non-sack pressures per sack to be of equal value in EPA.

In 2021 Hendrickson had 14.0 sacks and 45 total pressures (sacks + pressures, so 31 non-sack pressures). That is a total of -35.997 EPA.
In 2022 Hendrickson had 8.0 sacks and 35 total pressures (so 27 non-sack pressures). That's a total of -23.569 EPA.

That's a difference of 12.428 EPA. As someone mentioned in a different thread on this board, 4 of the Bengals 5 losses this year (postseason included) were lost by a total of 11 points. You obviously can't determine when and where the plays would have happened if they had happened, but I bring that up just to show that 12.428 EPA could be a HUGE difference in a season.

If Hendrickson wanted to have the same EPA from sacks and pressures as he did in 2021 despite having 6 less sacks, he would have needed to get roughly 69.5 total pressures with his 8 sacks. For comparison, the leader in the NFL this year had 56 total pressures and he was 9 ahead of 2nd place. So it isn't feasible to just replace that many sacks by getting extra pressures (which he still didn't do).



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And now I am done with math for the day. Lol