Hogs Haven
Prospects who arrive violently and turn the ball over
In the previous roundup of Ball-hawking cornerbacks, I mentioned that Joe Whitt Jr. sees generating more turnovers as a key area for improvement of his defense. He succinctly articulated his defensive philosophy in his introductory press conference:
3-4, 4-3 ... everyone plays the same coverages. Structure doesn’t matter. The main thing that matters is are we going to arrive violently and turn the ball over and disrupt these quarterbacks.
The defense failed to deliver the take-aways he was hoping for in his first season as defensive coordinator. The Commanders finished the season ranked 20th in the league in defensive turnovers, and 26th in interceptions. The lack of playmakers in his secondary was clearly a source of frustration for Whitt, early in the season. He came back to the need for his defense to generate more take-aways nearly every time he spoke to the media.
Whitt’s focus on taking the ball away was not misplaced. Few individual plays have greater impact on game outcomes than turnovers. In the 2024 regular season, like every year, teams won 50% of games in which they had as many giveaways as takeaways. Teams that enjoyed a +1 turnover differential won 70.6% of their games. Adding a second defensive takeaway, to increase the turnover differential to +2, increased the win probability to 82.6%.
Players who can regularly make turnovers are game changing talents. Adding more of those types of players is the biggest need facing the Commanders, as Adam Peters builds a championship-level team around Jayden Daniels.
This article continues the search for players who can help the Commanders assemble a defense that arrives violently and generates turnovers. The next article in the series will shift the focus to disrupting those quarterbacks.
In case you missed them, here are my previous 2025 draft roundups:
To help identify players of interest, I filtered PFF’s NCAA player database using three metrics of coverage performance, which I’ll list as MiBV Stats. Interception Rate and Pass Defense Rate helped identify safeties with exceptional ballhawking production or potential. Yards Per Coverage Snap was used to filter out CBs who make plays on the ball at the expense of giving up yardage in coverage.
Interception Rate (INT%): This is simply the rate at which the player intercepted the ball, expressed as a percentage of targets in coverage. Correcting for playing time gives a clearer picture of how players compare to one another than raw interception counts. Since this metric will be unfamiliar to most readers, here are the ranges of values among 259 draft-eligible safeties who played more than 10 coverage snaps in 2024:
Max: 33.3%
Top 10%: 10.3%
Top Quartile: 6.7%
Median: 3.2%
Bottom 40%: 0
Pass Defense Rate (PD%): Interceptions are fairly rare events, and not all safeties make them in a given season. Interceptions are usually proportional to...
