2015 to 2017 Darrelle Revis: An Analysis (Warning: long)
There is no doubt that Darrelle Revis has been one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL. He is an elite talent. Through eight seasons, it looks like he’s headed to Canton. From a talent standpoint, it hurts whenever a team loses a player like that, and it helps when a team gains a player like that. Yesterday, the Patriots got less talented and the Jets got more talented.
Despite what some people would have you believe, however, there are great cornerbacks outside of Darrelle Revis. Believe it or not, great cornerbacks existed before the Revis/Sherman/Peterson era! I know that probably just blew your mind, but it’s true, and as such, we have the ability to look at historical precedent when it comes to top cornerbacks as they move into their thirties.
Both the NFL Hall of Fame and pro-football-reference.com release all-decade teams honoring the best of the best. The game has obviously changed a lot over the years, so I’ll keep it to fairly recent history with the 1990s and 2000s teams where ten total cornerbacks were selected: Deion Sanders, Rod Woodson, Aeneas Williams, Darrell Green, Eric Allen, Champ Bailey, Charles Woodson, Ronde Barber, Ty Law, and Chris McAlister. Let’s look at their careers’ compared to Revis’, and try to get an idea of what Revis will look like during the three guaranteed years of his new Jets contract.
***NOTE: The metric I’ll be using for this breakdown is Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value (AV). Like any “advanced statistic” that attempts to gauge player value, it is very imperfect, but it’s a reasonable jumping off point. You can read about it in-depth here on Pro Football Reference. If you’d like to be quickly convinced of its relative merit, the top 3 players according to AV in 2014 were J.J. Watt (22), Aaron Rodgers (21) and DeMarco Murray (19), the top 3 in 2013 were Peyton Manning (19), Richard Sherman (19) and Louis Vasquez (19), and the top 3 in 2012 were Adrian Peterson (19), J.J. Watt (19) and Geno Atkins (18).***
Revis came into the NFL for his age-22 season and has played through his age-29 season. Here are his AVs for each season, as compared to the average, median, minimum, and maximum values of the 10 aforementioned all-decade cornerbacks.
It’s easy to see that Revis was special almost right off the bat. Although he was slightly below average (remember, in this case average means average for the 10 best players at corner from 1990-2009) in his first year, he rocketed ahead outperforming the average figure by 22.6 points from year 2 up until his injury.
Even with that injury year and the down season in Tampa, his stellar 2014 brought him up to a total of 7.0 AV points above our average. Only Rod Woodson, Champ Bailey, and Eric Allen posted higher totals against the average, as you can see below.
Using that info, let’s narrow our sample a bit so we’re working with players that more closely match what Revis has done his first 9 years: we’ll do this by making Revis the median and taking the 3 players with AVs directly above and below him: that means we add Ronde Barber, Deion Sanders, and Aeneas Williams to the aforementioned Woodson-Bailey-Allen trio.
Looking at the year-by-year values for those six players individually and in terms of averages of the six, we see some interesting stuff. First off, the six had an average AV of 15.5 in their age-29 seasons; that number actually represents the peak for the year-over-year average of these six players and is 1.5 points above Revis’ figure this past year; unless you’re somehow clinging to the idea that Revis “still isn’t back from his knee” these comparison players are more than fair and using their careers as a baseline, elite corners peak from their mid to late 20s.
In the age-30 to age-32 seasons, there was some success and there was some total drop-off. Deion Sanders put up 3 of the 4 best years of his career in those seasons, but he was also returning punts during that time to the tune of a 12.9 yard average and four touchdowns. Meanwhile, Ronde Barber was just plain good in posting 39 AV points over that time.
The other guys, however, weren’t what they’d been to that point in their careers. After the average 15.5 figure at age-29, it drops to 9.0, 11.0, and 8.5 for 30-32. Of the players in that group not named Sanders or Barber, there were only two double-digit AV seasons in the 12 seasons played for their age 30-32 years (17%); in comparison, that group posted double-digit AVs 21 times in 28 opportunities during their age 23-29 seasons (75%).
All this is basically to say, yes Revis has been great, but this is where the end of the road has begun for many elite cornerbacks. The Jets were willing to bet about 10% of their salary cap annually for the next three seasons that Revis will be a Deion Sanders or a Ronde Barber, and the Patriots are betting that maybe he’s, ya know, just a Rod Woodson or Aeneas Williams or Champ Bailey.
Revis wanted to be paid for what he’s done and the Pats wanted to pay (overpay, even) for what he’s likely to do. With the way each side negotiates, and considering the other teams in the market, there was likely never a deal to be had beyond 2014.
Darrelle Revis was a great Patriot in 2014. He was a major part of putting a Lombardi Trophy in Patriot Place. I harbor absolutely no ill will towards him. To the contrary, I’m grateful that I got to spend 2014 watching his greatness up close. But 2014 may very well be his last season of true greatness. The Patriots were not negotiating with 2014 Darrelle Revis, they were negotiating with 2015-2017 Darrelle Revis. For that reason, they made the right choice.
Tldr: Revis was exactly what we wanted when he was a Patriot, but elite cornerbacks tend to start trending downwards in their early-30s. Considering the price tag, letting him walk was the right move.