03-03-2021, 01:19 AM
(03-03-2021, 12:47 AM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Um, it means a ton if you care about your defense stopping offenses and giving your offense the ball. Can't find the reddit thing I was reading about it, but they looked at a whole season's worth of sacks (something like over 1,100).
Well over 80% of drives with a sack don't get a first down after the sack.
If the sack is for a bigger loss than 5 yards, that number goes up to almost 90%
Sacks are absolute drive killers, yet Lawson only has 11.5 sacks in the 3 years since his rookie year, and just 2 in the 12 games since he became the starter. There's a reason why people pay for that "fan friendly stat" and it's not because ti doesn't actually mean much.
Win rate is just the NFL version of FIP. Trying to assign what-could-have-beens and what-should-have-beens to players instead of accepting the reality of what did. Should-have-beens and could-have-beens don't win games. You "win" your pass rush but the QB still throws a TD down the field because you didn't take him down, you didn't actually "win" your pass rush.
Not sure about your Reddit thing, but no one who follows analytics believes sacks are nearly as valuable as fans think. All your anecdotal numbers are nice, now show me the same numbers but replace sacks with TFL. Relying on sacks again fails to account for value generated by pressure, a throw away because of pressure is a win. An errant throw because of pressure is actually a more valuable play than a sack except on 4th down or a sack fumble. As I already mentioned, the biggest issue is it doesn’t mean you actually did anything only that you were the same place the QB was at the end of a play.
This is pretty much universally to be accepted in the new age of football statistics. Sacks are not this all important stat and there is plenty of data to back it up. You mentioned Clowney and the Seahawks, while he didn’t account for massive sack numbers their defensive analytics did regress so badly they had to go get Dunlap mid year because they couldn’t generate the pressures that Clowney did that resulted in negative plays.
Sacks are a function of winning reps but also of poor QB play, great coverage, and some times luck. That is why pass rush win rate is a better indicator of skill and why it’s more readily used in evaluation that a stat like sacks. You can only win the rep in front of you, if you beat a guy in 2 seconds and sack a guy and the guy across you wins his in 5 but Sam Darnold won’t throw the ball away and let’s you sack him they were not equal in the talent required to achieve them (this was Maxx Crosby) which is why sacks aren’t really meaningful.
