Best Cornerback Charting Stats 2013

by Aaron Schatz

Let's break out the cornerback charting stats for 2013. These stats come courtesy of the Football Outsiders Game Charting Project. There are two main stats we track. The first, Yards per Pass, is simply the average yardage gained on every pass where we list this cornerback in coverage. The other stat, Success Rate, tells you how often the cornerback prevents opposing receivers from what we consider a successful gain: 45 percent of needed yards on first down, 60 percent on second down, and 100 percent on third down. Note that nickelbacks will often rank much better in Yards per Pass than in Success Rate, while starting corners who blew a couple of huge plays over the course of the season will rank much better in Success Rate than in Yards per Pass.

As usual, the typical caveats about the game charting apply: this is imperfect data charted by a group of volunteers plus a handful of FO staff members. Sometimes a cornerback will benefit because he happens to be in coverage when a quarterback throws a bad pass, even if he wasn't covering close. Sometimes a cornerback will benefit from a better pass rush, because it's easier to cover when you don't need to cover for six seconds. The cornerback charting stats have been very volatile, bouncing up and down year-by-year for a lot of players, and the best cornerbacks will occasionally rank lower in these stats because quarterbacks only throw in their direction when they make a mistake. As we always say, these stats should not be seen as absolute statements on player value. They're just part of the story.

As we do with the cornerback charting stats in the book and on the player pages, I've removed passes marked as Hail Mary, Hit in Motion, Tipped at Line, or Thrown Away. I've also removed wide receiver screens, which aren't really a good way to measure cornerback coverage because a cornerback in man coverage is going to (or at least, is supposed to) immediately get blocked out of the play by another wide receiver. Once again this year, we're bringing you the most accurate numbers by waiting to post cornerback stats until they've been double-checked. These stats have also been analyzed to give half-credit on plays where we list two defenders in double coverage, or where we listed DEFENDER1 as "Hole in Zone" but also list a specific defender as responsible for that zone. We also have both actual numbers and the metrics adjusted for the quality of receivers each cornerback had to cover. (Two metrics, average pass distance faced by each cornerback and yards after catch, are not adjusted for opponent.)

Pass interference is included, although no other defensive penalties are included. With defensive pass interference, the defender flagged is almost always the player who was in coverage on the intended receiver; with illegal contact or defensive holding, the flag often comes far away from where an actual pass may be thrown.

This year compared to past years, there were about a dozen more cornerbacks listed in coverage on at least 40 passes. So for this year's tables, I've raised the minimum to include players who either are listed in coverage on 50 passes or had eight games started. I decided to count Tyrann Mathieu as a cornerback since he played the nickelback role whenever the Cardinals had a sub package on the field, but I'm not including Aaron Williams of Buffalo who played safety most of the year but started at cornerback in Weeks 4-7. Eighty-eight cornerbacks qualified to be ranked in these stats, and I've got a dozen guys on each table here. To give more information about the cornerbacks that saw the field the most, each table also lists the next three cornerbacks who would be ranked if we limited the minimum to only the 36 cornerbacks who started at least 14 games.

Oh, and as an added bonus, three of this season's best cornerbacks will be special Football Outsiders elite stars in Madden 25 Ultimate Team this upcoming weekend. More on that below.

We'll start with the cornerbacks who allowed the fewest Adjusted Yards per Pass according to our game charting. Of course, we could start with Adjusted Success Rate, and we would have the same guy on top. And boy, is it not who you expect. 

We spent a lot of last year trying to figure out how the Giants ranked eighth in pass defense DVOA even though their once-strong pass rush had fallen to 28th in Adjusted Sack Rate. Well, here's one big reason. Trumaine McBride's charting stats for 2013 are completely surreal. Look at how far ahead of everyone else he is in Adjusted Yards per Pass. We're talking here about a player who was almost entirely a special teamer prior to last season and played only one game over the past two years. He shows up in New York this year, makes the Giants roster, enters the starting lineup for good around Week 7, and proceeds to have an incredible year of stopping opposing receivers. We went back and re-watched a bunch of Giants plays to try to figure out if we had somehow missed long gains that should have been blamed on McBride. We couldn't find any. We list McBride in coverage on only three receptions over 16 yards last season: two for 56 and 21 yards by DeSean Jackson in Week 5, and a 52-yard completion from Scott Tolzien to Jarrett Boykin in Week 11. We only list him giving up two touchdowns: a 12-yarder by Doug Baldwin in Week 15 and a six-yard gain by Danny Woodhead in Week 14 where he was probably in zone coverage and maybe shouldn't even be blamed. Despite those two touchdowns coming late in the year, McBride actually got better as the year went along; he missed Week 13 with an injury but in the final four weeks after that he improved to 3.0 Adjusted Yards per Pass with a 71 percent Adjusted Success Rate.

These stats scream "nickelback with a small sample size who you can't take seriously," except McBride was a starter on the outside for two-thirds of the year, not a nickelback who barely slid above our minimums to be ranked in the charting stats. He did cover opposition No. 3 receivers in the last couple weeks of the season, but they were No. 3 receivers who generally play outside and run deep routes, such as Jermaine Kearse and Aldrick Robinson, not undersized chain-moving slot guys. You could explain away these stats as being partly the product of the Giants playing a lot of Cover-2, where the cornerback isn't necessarily the guy "in coverage" when a receiver goes deep downfield. Except McBride himself sees the Giants defense of 2013 as the complete opposite. I was able to e-mail McBride because he had actually contacted me a few years ago when he was one of our top guys in special teams tackles. I asked him for his personal viewpoint on why he was able to have by far the best season of his career in 2013, and he responded:

There are numerous reasons why I feel last year went so much better. Coaching staff, defensive scheme, technique, offseason training,etc. Overall the Giants organization does a great job of getting the best out of players... Coach Fewell's defensive scheme is great and it fits my style of play. I'm more of a man corner vs zone. The majority of my career I was in a Cover-2 scheme... Coach Fewell has a Cover- 2 background but I wouldn't say we are a true Cover-2 defense. Perry has his own unique style.

I must admit I didn't notice big changes in Fewell's scheme from watching the Giants on television this year, but of course nobody pays much attention to coverage schemes when watching a game on live television unless they're specifically looking for that. If you want to know if the Giants were playing more man or zone concepts this season, it's hard to beat asking one of the guys who was actually playing those concepts on the field.

William Gay of the Steelers is another unheralded corner who had a great season by our charting stats last year; his fine stats are even more interesting when you consider that on the other side of the field, Ike Taylor's skills completely crumbled. Jimmy Smith really broke out this year as Baltimore's top cornerback and did very well in both stats. So did other well-regarded veterans including Patrick Peterson, Darrelle Revis, and Joe Haden.

In Atlanta, Desmond Trufant had an excellent year for a rookie cornerback. Top-drafted rookie cornerbacks almost always struggle in these stats in their first year. Revis was just average, for example, and Peterson was terrible. The good news for the Falcons is that Trufant was a glaring exception to the rule. The bad news is that the last first-round rookie to have charting stats this impressive was Devin McCourty, and whatever he was doing his rookie season didn't last. Within two years he had switched positions to safety.

Drayton Florence is the patron saint of cornerback stat oscillation: near the top of the league in 2009, near the bottom of the league in 2010 and 2011, mediocre in 2012, back to having great numbers again in 2013. He's right above the minimum to be ranked, so don't go crazy buying Drayton Florence jerseys after you read this.

Next, we'll look at the top cornerbacks in Success Rate. Success Rate, to remind everyone, is the percentage of passes that don't manage to get at least 45 percent of needed yards on first down, 60 percent of needed yards on second down, or 100 percent of needed yards on third down.

Many of the names on this list are the same as our las t list, but we add some corners who overall played very steady but did give up a few big plays to raise their Adjusted Yards per Pass averages. Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, for example, is getting blamed here for a 73-yard touchdown by Denarius Moore where DRC and Duke Ihenacho collided trying to tackle Moore and he ran unimpeded into the end zone. As an added bonus, we've got him down for a 79-yard touchdown by Dez Bryant which also featured a blown tackle by Ihenacho.

The really interesting listing here is one of the most appropriately named players in the NFL, Nickell Robey. Yes, he was Buffalo's nickelback, but his stats reverse the usual nickelback pattern and he ranks higher in Adjusted Success Rate than in Adjusted Yards per Pass. He did well in both, though.

At this point, most of you are probably asking one question: where the hell is Richard Sherman? Well, this is where we get into the problem I noted at the beginning of this article, where sometimes great corners have mediocre numbers because they only get thrown at when they make mistakes. Sherman was 29th with 56 percent Adjusted Success Rate and 47th with 7.7 Adjusted Yards per Pass. But before you go crazy thinking Sherman is overrated, note that we only listed him in coverage on 65 passes. That ranked 58th among corners even though Sherman started every single game for a team whose opponents were often stuck passing to try to catch up in losses. Honestly, a better way to rate a cornerback is something like what Cian Fahey does with his "The Numbers, The Tape, The Verdict" series, analyzing every play where a cornerback is in man coverage, even if the ball isn't thrown at his receiver. Unfortunately, doing this for every cornerback in the league would take way too much time to be remotely possible.

This next table is more for conversation than for any kind of evidence of which players were or were not very good this year. Allowing YAC often has more to do with the defensive scheme than with a cornerback's skill set.

After years as one of the top corners in the league, especially by our charting stats, Asante Samuel completely imploded this year. Yet he somehow made the YAC allowed top ten despite being awful at tackling. Your guess is as good as mine.

During the 2013 season, we partnered with EA Sports to bring special Football Outsiders-branded items to Madden 25 Ultimate Team. This weekend, starting Friday, we'll be celebrating three of the top cornerbacks of the year according to our charting stats with these players available in packs:

• NYG CB Trumaine McBride, 97 OVR
• PIT CB William Gay, 95 OVR
• BAL CB Jimmy Smith, 95 OVR

We'll revisit these stats in a few days, looking at the players with the worst numbers in 2013.