The Patriots Have the Best Pair of CBs the NFL Has Seen in Years
Monday morning in the Knee Jerk Reactions column about the Patriots-Bengals game while talking about the play of the Pats cornerbacks, I compared watching JC Jackson to one of the corners from the past:
For those of us who are still scarred by the memory of guys like Darius Butler, superhumanly gifted, agile athletes who couldn’t never once get their heads around as completion after completion whistled past their earholes, watching Jackson play is a gift from Santa. One that keeps on giving to everyone but the college scouts who all somehow decided he wasn’t draft-worthy.
I used Bulter as a reference just because I sort of felt ownership of him. I predicted the Patriots would draft him when he was coming out of UConn and saw him play a charity basketball game in my town before his rookie season and he was one of the most impressively athletic specimens I'd ever seen in my life. Every trip up court became an alley-oop lob to him where he'd jump up through one skylight and down through another for the slam. But became one of the most frustrating Patriots to watch in the Dynasty era.
But I could've named any of a dozen failed defensive backs from around 2008 to 2014. Because for every Devin McCourty, Aqib Talib or Darrelle Revis we had around here, we were subjected to untold numbers of Jonathan Wilhite, Terrance Wheatley, Alfonzo Dennard, Ellis Hobbs, Leigh Bodden, Ras-I Dowling, Sterling Moore or Marquise Cole, just to name a few, that were unleashed upon the secondary like plagues in the Old Testament. (I want to spare Kyle Arrington because he had some quality seasons as strictly slot corner, but I can't repress the memory of him having to get pulled from Super Bowl XLIX because he was such a Bruckheimerian disaster.) The point is, it's worth remembering how bad some of the defensive backery we've seen around here has been in order to fully appreciate how good it's been in recent memory.
That said, I don't think any of us come close to appreciating what we're witnessing the way we should. According to Pro Football Focus, here are the top cornerbacks in the league, ranked by Passer Rating when targeted:
According to Doug Kyed of NESN,
No NFL team in the PFF-era (2006 and beyond) has ever had cornerbacks in those two top spots. No cornerback has ever allowed a passer rating lower than 31.1 (Casey Hayward, 2012) in a full season. Only four cornerbacks since 2006 have allowed a passer rating lower than Gilmore’s 32.8 metric. …
No cornerback duo has more combined interceptions than Gilmore and Jackson’s 11 picks. And no cornerback duo has reached that mark since 2009.
For the record, in 2009 Charles Woodson and Nick Collins in Green Bay combined for 15 interceptions and Leon Hall and Jonathan Joseph had six each in Cincinnati. And the dance team of Jackson & Gilmore has two more games to go. As NESN also points out, the Elves working in Cris Collinsworth's hollowed out Analytics Tree at PFF assigned the blame for Deshaun Watson's lateral "receiving" touchdown to Jackson because he was the closest defender. That accounts for his only TD. Otherwise his numbers would be even better.
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To put what Jackson and Gilmore are doing even further into perspective, only 11 times all year has any quarterback in the league posted a Passer Rating as low as Jackson and Gilmore have held all opposing QBs to this season:
In other words, these two have held all their opponents combined to numbers below the worst starting QBs in football playing their worst games. So it should follow logically that three of the seven worst passing performances of the year came against New England (Recycling the same graphic because visual learning is important when teaching Millennials.):
So it's been a remarkable thing to watch. Even in a region that has seen the one of the hardest position in sports played at a Hall of Fame level from Revis to Ty Law to - for those of us who saw the first "Star Wars" movie at a theater - Michael Haynes. And I'll throw in borderline Pro Bowlers like Asante Samuel, Malcolm Butler, Logan Ryan and Devin McCourty's 7 INT 2010 season, before he transitioned to safety, still the best rookie season any Patriots corner has ever had.
The even better news is that an already historically good cornerback situation should only get better as Jason McCourty (No. 7 on that Passer Rating chart) gets back from a groin pull and second round rookie Joejuan Williams works his way up the depth chart. Which is why it's a good thing to get perspective by remembering how bad it's been in the past. When it looked like the NFL had legislated cornerback play out of the league and the draft picks were failing and it looked like we'd never see this level of performance ever again. It helps you appreciate just how lucky we are to witness Jackson and Gilmore every week.