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A player Jeff Hafley coached in college tops the list
Beyond cornerback, a position we already addressed in a previous advanced stats post, the biggest need for the Green Bay Packers this offseason is at defensive end. Despite paying Rashan Gary and Preston Smith, who was traded mid-season, and drafting Lukas Van Ness in the first round, the Packers struggled to get to the quarterback with their front four this year.
To make matters worse, all of the buzz entering the season was about how defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley’s new defensive system was going to allow the defensive line to be more aggressive and let the players fly off of the ball. It simply never happened, outside of spurts against the Tennessee Titans and Seattle Seahawks, when the team recorded sacks in clusters against spring league-caliber offensive lines.
After the season, head coach Matt LaFleur, Hafley and general manager Brian Gutekunst all stated that they hope that the team can rush with four moving forward, rather than having to rely on second-level blitzers for their pass rush. Defensive line coach Jason Rebrovich was fired after just one year under Hafley and was replaced with former New England Patriots defensive coordinator DeMarcus Covington, who is tasked with getting the ship back on course in 2025.
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at some numbers that paint a picture of the Packers’ defensive end landscape entering the new league year. We’ll try to identify how well (or poorly) Green Bay’s ends are playing and what the free agency crop looks like right now.
The best way to capture how good edge defenders are as pass rushers, in my opinion, would be to look at how many pressures they were able to record. To get rid of odd one-year outliers, either one-year wonders or injury seasons, I’m going to look at the last two seasons of play, as I did with the cornerbacks.
According to NFL Pro’s data, the league-level player tracking data, 84 pass-rushers have played as many edge defender snaps as Lukas Van Ness over the last two years. For the purpose of this exercise, we’re going to call those players “qualifiers.” Among qualifiers, players registered pressures on roughly 13 percent of their snaps over this period.
Now that we know that number, we can compare a player’s individual pressure rate to the league-wide average to figure out how many pressures above or below the “qualifier” average an edge rusher has played over the last two seasons and rank them.
Despite having a down year in 2024, Rashan Gary still ranks 13th in this metric with 113 total pressures, 19 more than would have been expected for an average edge defender over the 723 snaps that he's played from 2023 to 2024. Unfortunately for the Packers, though, both Kingsley Enagbare and Lukas...
