JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Historically, sacks have been the metric used to gauge the effectiveness of pass-rushers.
They’ve really been the only official NFL statistic available to identify the league’s top pass-rushers.
While sacks can still be used to get a rough idea of the league’s top performers, the metric has been relegated by many in favor of pressures as the predominant statistic available to evaluate the position.
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The main reason for this is that sacks are dependent on such a small sample size of plays and are often attributed not to the player that actually created the sack. If a defensive end pushes the quarterback into his teammate’s lap, the teammate is, at least to a degree, wrongfully credited with the sack.
Gauging a player’s effectiveness by just a handful of plays isn’t very honest either. It’s for these reasons that pressures have begun to dethrone sacks as the better way to assess pass-rush effectiveness on a snap-to-snap basis.
At most, a player will average one sack a game over the course of a season. When looking at pressures, however, players can rack up four, five a game. Cincinnati Bengals’ Trey
Hendrickson averaged 5.4 pressure per game this season as he led the NFL with 92 pressures.
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We all know how important sacks can be, but that begs the question, how much does pressure matter?
Let’s take a look!
When looking at the 2024 season, it was quite the disparity, according to Pro Football Focus. To start, average quarterback accuracy dropped from 79.0% in a clean pocket down to 63.8% when pressured.
Unsurprisingly, completion rate fell alongside it, plummeting from 72.1% all the way down to 48.9%. To put that number into perspective, only five times has a QB had a completion rate under 50% in the 32-team era (since 2002).
When looking deeper into the dichotomy, the gap only widens. Clean pockets saw a touchdown to interception ratio of 2.7 compared to that of just 1.6 when pressured.
In total, the average NFL Rating when pressured was that of 101.6 and just 71.4 when under duress. While many quarterbacks perform much better than that figure under duress, just two saw an NFL Rating of 100.0 when under pressure (Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa).
Pressure rate allowed is often used to determine the best offensive lines in pass-protection, however, it can be a bit misleading. The average time elapsed on pressured plays was 3.6 seconds, over a full second longer than the average time taken in a clean pocket (1.4).
The average time to throw can significantly impact the amount of pressure the quarterback faces. For instance the Jaguars were the fifth least pressured team in 2024, however, they allowed pressure on average in just 2.59 seconds, eight fastest.
The Jaguars’ quick time to throw shed a brighter light on the offensive line than they probably deserved last season. In fact, average time to pressure allowed might be a much better way to evaluate pass-protection.
Of the eight teams that gave their quarterbacks the most time before being pressured, all eight made the playoffs. If you were wondering how much pressure matters, that sole statistic might just tell you right there.
Keep your quarterback clean and good things will happen. Conversely, the inverse is just as true. The more a team can pressure the opposing team’s quarterback, the better.
Whether it’s turnovers, misfires, sacks, fumbles, or just a checkdown, pressure is the ubiquitous symptom behind it all
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