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Nick Collins ran away with the top safety spot, so who will join him?
In our continuing series on the Packers All-Quarter Century Team, let’s take a look at the last line of defense from a surprisingly strong crop of candidates!
Unsurprisingly, Nick Collins sprinted away with the vote yesterday as we looked to confirm who was the Green Bay Packers’ best safety of the last 25 years. Collins’ incredible stretch from 2008 to 2010 made him a no-brainer choice, getting more than 75 percent of the votes.
Now we get to a much tougher question: who should join him at the other safety position? The Packers have some great candidates (and some names who were less exciting but solid players nonetheless), so this should make for a very interesting decision.
Here are your options!
Note: All stats shown are as a member of the Green Bay Packers only, from the 2000 through 2024 seasons only.
1x Pro Bowl, 1x Second Team All Pro
Regular season stats: 71 Games, 14 INT for 116 yards, 25 PDs, 3 FF, 1 FR, 378 Tackles (299 Solo), 5.5 Sacks
Postseason stats: 7 Games, 3 INT, 53 yards, 11 PDs, 31 Tackles (25 Solo).
The statistics on Clinton-Dix are so much better than the player, so much so that when I see a quarterback overthrow a receiver into the waiting arms of a safety who was playing too far back, I think of it as a “Ha Ha Special” to this day.
Clinton-Dix was an opportunist, and we should at least acknowledge that hey, when someone threw the ball to him, the man caught it. Taking advantage of your opportunities is a skill, and given the leverage implications of a turnover, it’s a pretty useful one! That said, we should consider the degree of difficulty on his 14 Packer picks, as the only reason a better safety may have had fewer interceptions is because they were actually playing better coverage, closer to the intended target.
Clinton-Dix was also far from a sure tackler, though occasionally he would have his moments, but he was actually a decent pass-rusher when called on to do so. While certainly not a great player, I do think that history has done him dirty a bit. HHCD was a first rounder, and that first round pedigree will dog you forever if you’re not above average, but the fact is that he never should have been a first rounder, and it will always be weird that the analytically-minded Packers grabbed a 4.86 RAS safety that high. HHCD’s 7.16 3-cone converts to a 2.89 RAS, and the Packers took him in THE FIRST. He ran a 4.58 with a bottom third vert! Just, what were we doing here?
And so it’s not really his fault that he was picked this high, and for the tools that he did possess, hey, he wasn’t terrible.
He also had three playoff picks, and in a different universe...
