Mile High Report
Trey Hendrickson led the league in sacks, but sacks are over-hyped. Pressures are the truest measure of a pass rusher’s effectiveness. Elite pass rushers may go games without a sack, but they rarely get shut-out – have a game with zero pressures.
So first let’s talk about a QB pressure. A pressure is when a rusher gets close enough to a QB to effect the QB without actually hitting the QB. A QBhit is a pressure. A QB knockdown is a pressure and a QBhit. A sack puts a check in all four boxes. Unfortunately, different sites credit pressures differently since they are the most subjective of the pass rush stats.
SISdatahub.com is much more free with pressures. Trey Hendrickson led the league in pressures according to SIS (85) and pro-football-reference.com (54). The player who got screwed over the most by PFR was Jared Verse. Sis credited him with 39 more QB pressures than PFR did. Seven other guys were shorted 30 or more pressures by PFR. See the table below (PRSS SIS – PFR)
If you read my work, you know I like rate stats. So I figured pressures per game for both sites (min 20 pressures on SIS). Looking at it this way we can see the most effective pass rushers and the least effective pass rushers (on a per game basis, not on a per rush basis). This really only works for comparing guys whose job it is to primarily rush the passer (>85% pass rush). If you rank guys by pressures per game, you have to get to the 39th ranked player (Nik Bonitto) to find a player who dropped into coverage more than 15% of the time. Bonitto only rushed 83.2% of the time on passing downs that he played.
Nik’s sack to pressure rate (SIS) was the 3rd best among heavy pass rushers (min 100 rushes and 20 pressures) at 28.1%. Only Dexter Lawrence (34.6%) and Patrick Jones II (29.2%) were higher. On the other end of the spectrum two pass rushers had a 0% conversion rate (sacks/pressures). Myles Murphy and Moro Ojomo both had zero sacks and more than 20 pressures (23 and 26).
Aidan Hutchinson was having a monster season before you got hurt last season. 7.60 pressures per game is insane! That’s almost two pressures better than Maxx Crosby who was second. When 4.o per game is elite, getting almost double that is amazing. Former DPOY TJ Watt only got 3.6 per game last season. So let’s talk about consistency.
How often do these rushers have huge games and how often do they get shut out. I’m going to use SIS since they show pressures in their game logs. Because this is time consuming and I have other things to do over Labor Day weekend, I only looked at pass rushers who were greater than 14.50% pressure rate (I polished the SIS data which can have some errors). I then plotted pressures per game for all 23 players who were better...
