Sacks are a poor way to grade an offensive line: there are only a few a game, and many are the quarterback's doing. So we built two ratings from player tracking instead, using where all 22 players are 10 times a second on 5,625 dropbacks from weeks 1 to 6 of the 2024 season:
- Line rating: how far the nearest pass rusher is from the QB 2.5 seconds after the snap, against an average defense in a standard dropback (4 rushers, 5 blockers, shotgun, 1st/2nd and 10).
- Pressure rating: how often the offense gets pressured before the throw, same standard dropback.
Both are Bayesian models with team effects, and we tested them on weeks they hadn't seen (trained on weeks 1–3 and tested on week 4, then 1–4 on week 5, then 1–5 on week 6).
TL;DR
- Line ratings repeat. An offense's rating from earlier weeks predicted the next week's space every time we tested it (rank correlations 0.59, 0.64, 0.54).
- Space and pressure barely agree. The quarterback is most of the difference.
- A pass rush is its players. A defense's past results barely predict next week's. The sack and QB-hit record of the players it puts on the field does.
- Offenses don't adjust to a scary front. They keep a blocker in slightly more often, throw no faster, and get pressured more.
Most and least space at 2.5 seconds (league average 2.9 yards): Denver and Washington lead at 3.4 yards, followed by Baltimore and Buffalo. The Chargers, Colts, Texans and Falcons trail at about 2.6 to 2.7 yards.
Pressured before the throw (league average 17%)
| Least |
|
Most |
|
| Miami |
11% |
Pittsburgh |
25% |
| Carolina |
13% |
Tennessee |
24% |
| Jacksonville |
13% |
Cleveland |
23% |
|
|
Philadelphia |
22% |
|
|
New England |
21% |
Where the two rankings disagree
| Offense |
Rank by space |
Rank by pressure |
| Washington (Daniels) |
2nd |
24th |
| Baltimore (Jackson) |
3rd |
22nd |
| Philadelphia (Hurts) |
8th |
29th |
| Carolina (mostly Dalton) |
21st |
2nd |
Why: it's mostly the QB's legs, not his clock
- Offenses whose QBs scramble more get pressured more than their line implies (rank correlation 0.52 across 32 offenses).
- Holding the ball matters too, but less (0.34). Rodgers' Jets release fastest in the league (median 2.1 s); Jackson's Ravens release at 2.7 s.
- "Isn't a pressured QB just forced to scramble?" Partly. But the QB's scramble rate from 2023, before any of this season's pressure, still predicts the gap (0.43).
- Raw speed doesn't: the combine 40 shows no link at all.
Pass rush = personnel. Going into week 7, Kansas City and Denver put the most productive pass rushers on the field; Carolina, New England and Arizona the least. Because it's built from the players, it moves with injuries. Dallas was 3rd to 6th in weeks 2–4, then fell to 23rd and 25th with Parsons and Lawrence out.
Caveats: this is six weeks of data, so the intervals are wide and 12 offenses can't be told apart from average yet. About 5–7% of plays fail tracking and are left out.
On the site (free, no account needed): all 32 offenses on both ratings with intervals, every defense's pass-rush personnel rating week by week, one real dropback drawn from the tracking, and the full model and validation write-up: In this post https://advancedfootballstats.com/insights/nfl-pass-protection-ratings?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pass-protection
We're also following up on two questions people have asked us. Does a great run game slow the pass rush? It does on play-action; that post is up now. And mobile QBs get their own post next week.
Happy to answer questions about the method in the comments.
Disclosure: this is our own site and our own work. Play-by-play and player IDs come from nflverse.