Mile High Report
Would you rather have a consistent rusher or a boom and bust rusher?
While sacks get talked about often, pressures are the truest measure of the effectiveness of a pass rusher. SISdatahub.com and pro-football-reference.com both track QB pressures, but they don’t agree. SIS is much more generous with pressures. Trey Hendrickson led the league according to both sites, but SIS credited him with 85 pressures while PFR credited him with 54.
An old debate in sports is would you rather have a consistently good player or a player that can be great in one game and terrible in the next. To evaluate this for the pass rushers in the league I used the SIS data and looked at the average pressures per game for the top pass rushers in the league (40 or more pressures) and then I also looked at the standard deviation of their pressure numbers.
There were 55 players who got 40 or more pressures in 2024. I also included Aidan Hutchinson who would have gotten more than 40 if he did not miss a large portion of the season with injury. He finished with 38, but had one of the best pressures per game numbers in the league. There were 59 games when an elite pass rusher got “shut out”, meaning that they got zero pressures in a game.
Before we get into the deep data dive, lets look at the Denver Broncos pass rushers from last season in terms of their overall pass rush stats.
Our two sacks leaders, Jonathan Cooper and Nik Bonitto generated 53 and 48 pressures according to SIS. Our team leader was Zach Allen, but he also had 586 instances of rushing the passer, so his 69 pressures, which was near the top of the league, meant that he was only generating pressure on 11.8% of his pass rush snaps. Our best front five player in terms of pressure rate was Dondrea Tillman who only generated 21 pressures, but did that on only 149 pass rush snaps (14.9%). Jonah Elliss was still learning that he needed more pass rush moves to succeed in the NFL. His 8.2% pressure rate was bad for an edge, but Baron Browning’s 5.6% while he was still on the Broncos was terribad. It’s the main reason he was sent packing.
The top rushers in 2024 are listed in the table below sorted by pressure rate.
The Broncos best rusher in terms of pressure rate for guys with 40 or more pressures was John Franklin-Myers. His 13.3% was the best among our high volume pass rushers. Nik Bonitto was only shut out once during the 2024 season - in game 2. Zach Allen got more pressures per game than any Bronco rusher, but he was somewhat inconsistent. While he didn’t get shutout in any game, he did have two games where he only got one pressure. Those were gamess nine and game seventeen (at Baltimore and at KC).
In terms of pressures per game among the 55...
