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A former Packer has the best numbers
Considering that star cornerback Jaire Alexander has played less than a half-season in three of his past four years with the Green Bay Packers, on top of the defensive back having a $16.15 million base salary in 2025, there’s a good chance that the club is going to add a starting cornerback to their lineup this offseason. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what the upcoming free agency class has to offer, from a metrics perspective.
In my opinion, the best way to use metrics is by looking at multi-year numbers. This helps weed out one-year wonders, players who missed time due to injuries or players who played through injuries. A stat that I find a lot of value in is Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt (ANY/A), which is more correlated to wins than passer rating for quarterbacks.
Essentially, ANY/A treats touchdowns like a 20-yard bonus for offenses and interceptions as -45-yard dings. Since you don’t pay cornerbacks to rack up sacks, we’re just going to ignore that part of the methodology for this exercise.
Using NFL Pro’s data, which is the league-sponsored player tracking numbers, we can find out just how many yards and touchdowns each outside cornerback has allowed over the last two seasons, on just how many coverage snaps. Using those numbers, we can make apples-to-apples comparisons for these cornerbacks.
As a side note, the outside cornerback position is important in the context of the Packers because they are likely to keep 2024 second-round pick safety Javon Bullard in the slot moving forward. Based on how the team deployed their secondary in the second half of the season, that’s Bullard’s spot long-term.
With NFL Pro’s numbers, we can learn that Packers cornerback Carrington Valentine allowed 645 yards and a touchdown on 691 coverage snaps over the last two years when he played outside cornerback...but what’s the context of that within the frame of the entire league? Well, Valentine’s ANY/A, if we treated coverage snaps as attempts, would have been 0.9 over those snaps. The league average for the 98 outside cornerbacks who played at least 347 coverage snaps (the volume Keisean Nixon hit) over the last two years is 1.08. So Valentine is playing about 0.18 adjusted yards better per coverage snap than the league-average outside cornerback over the last two years, bringing in +128.6 adjusted yards of value for the Packers over that time.
Now that we’ve laid down the groundwork, here’s how the Packers’ current cornerbacks rank compared to qualifiers (98 outside cornerbacks) over the last two years:
As a reminder, a score of 0 would be dead average. Each of Valentine, Alexander and Nixon are playing like low-end CB1s to mid-level CB2s, in part because none of them have been starting at outside cornerback...
