FO looks at the league leaders in dropped passes against. Jerraud Powers was near the top. Tim Jennings had no one drop a pass with him covering. There isn’t much evidence that forcing drops is a skill, so Powers might just have had a lucky year.
- There was inconclusive evidence regarding any idea that teams would be better or worse at forcing drops
We’ll be covering the third point in a future article, but let’s check and see if 2009 matched up with 2007 and 2008 with regards to the first two topics.
In 2009, safeties and linebackers absolutely yielded more drops than cornerbacks. Passes where those players were in coverage were dropped an even 7.0 percent of the time; passes at cornerbacks were dropped 5.2 percent of the time. I’m thinking the reason why that is has to do with several factors; passes charted with safeties in coverage tend to be longer than passes thrown at cornerbacks, which make them more difficult to catch; they also involve more open space, which may limit the number of times our charters mark a pass as “defensed” instead of “dropped”. It could also be the case that passes thrown at those positions are to relatively inferior receivers that work in the slot or as the third or fourth option on a pass play.
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