There are those who will tell you that the votes for Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections aren’t a big deal. It’s just a popularity contest, right? Well, not really. A lot of players have bonuses built into their contracts based on their nominations on those teams. Hall of Fame voters absolutely take the number of Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections into account when deciding who is given the NFL’s greatest honor.
The All-Pro vote is supposed to be taken more seriously because there is not a fan element involved, but when looking at the selections from a panel of 50 media members, it’s hard to say that every vote should be given equal weight. And that, for all the reasons listed above, is a real problem. Here’s the list for the 2019 team; see what you think, and give these five suggestions for improving the process a look-see.
Give every voter a subscription to an advanced metrics website.
Whether it’s Pro Football Focus, Sports Info Solutions, or Football Outsiders, there are websites which, for a nominal subscription rate, give anybody a much better look at who’s doing what in the NFL. I’m not talking about PFF’s grades, per se — I find them far less accurate than their charting stats. But those charting stats have a lot of merit, as do the SiS and FO numbers. With these subscriptions, you can do everything from deducing which quarterbacks and receivers are the best on which routes, which outside cornerbacks and slot cornerbacks are the most effective in coverage, which teams run which defenses most effectively, and which pass-rushers are the most disruptive beyond just sack numbers. There are too many votes that are obviously skewed to old-school box-score thinking, and we should be way past that at this point in time. We have better metrics, and the game has exploded in both complexity and positional specificity.
PFF also has positional snap counts, which would have helped the one voter who wanted to add Chiefs defensive end Frank Clark to the list of interior linemen. Per PFF, Clark has 718 defensive snaps this season, and six of those are inside — one at left defensive tackle, four at right defensive tackle, and one at nose tackle. We don’t know what this voter was thinking, but we’d sure like to.
And speaking of that…
Vet the voters.
The most controversial vote in this year’s process was Bill Polian’s. The six-time NFL Executive of the Year and Hall-of-Famer famously said before Lamar Jackson was drafted in 2018 that Jackson should switch to receiver. Obviously, with Jackson picking up 47 of a possible 50 votes at quarterback this season, that opinion was a wild swing-and-miss. Polian was one of three voters who did not vote for Jackson; the other two were colleagues of his at SIRIUS XM Radio, Jim Miller and Pat Kirwan. As all three voted for Russell Wilson, and Wilson would be a shoo-in for NFL MVP in a lot of years where there wasn’t an elevated quarterback performance like Jackson’s, there may not be any fire with this smoke beyond the informed opinion of three voters. But it’s worth mentioning.
We don’t know what the motivation was behind Polian’s vote. We don’t know what the person who voted for Frank Clark as an interior defensive lineman was thinking. We don’t know if the three people who voted for Steelers safety Terrell Edmunds thought they were voting for his brother, Bills linebacker Terrell Edmunds, by mistake.
And we sure don’t know why Vikings safety Anthony Harris, one of two defensive players this season with six interceptions and no touchdowns allowed (Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White, who received 38 votes as a cornerback and one as a “defensive back” is the other) received only one vote overall. It could be argued that Harris has been one of the two or three most effective cover safeties in the NFL this season — the fact that he got just one vote is a screaming indictment of a process in which people aren’t watching the All-22. Because if you’re matching stats to tape, and two more of you think that Terrell Edmunds is an All-Pro safety than Anthony Harris, we’ve got problems here.
Perhaps it’s time to augment the roster of voters with the people who run those advanced metrics websites; they’re also the ones with staffs charting every move NFL players make.
Align positional designations to the modern NFL.
This has to happen now. Steelers edge-rusher T.J. Watt, a legitimate candidate for Defensive Player of the Year, received 22 votes as an edge-rusher, and 11 votes as a linebacker. The Steelers are one of 31 teams that play a ton of sub-package defensive fronts (the Seahawks, who play about 70% base defense, present the exception) in which at least five defensive backs are on the field, and any ostensible “outside linebacker” in a supposed 3-4 defense is actually an edge-rusher in a four-man nickel or dime front.
Per PFF, Watt had all but 19 of his 862 defensive line snaps as a “LEO” (hybrid rusher) or left outside linebacker. But most of those LOLB snaps had him rushing the passer. He wasn’t a linebacker in the same way Bobby Wagner or Demario Davis or Eric Kendricks is a linebacker — working the middle of the field or one of the true second-level outside linebacker positions. Watt had a total of 34 snaps in which he was designated as a second-level linebacker in a true 3-4 defense; perhaps his 34 snaps were just as impactful as Frank Clark’s six as a defensive tackle.
And if we’re counting coverage as valuable to a linebacker’s role, how is it that we’re calling Watt a linebacker when he was targeted in coverage five times all season? Bobby Wagner was targeted 71 times in coverage in 2019. Are we going to call him an interior defensive lineman because he blitzed from the A-gap a few times?
There has to be a better way to separate true edge-rushers from true linebackers. Perhaps a list of positional snap counts, which are readily available, and a floor of how many snaps you need at a position to get a vote at that position, would be helpful.
And while we’re at it…
Either define the “flex” position, or scrap it altogether.
A “flex” position, we suppose, is created to give players at non-listed/hybrid positions, such as receiving running back or slot receiver, a place to pick up well-deserved votes. But the lack of specificity makes the flex concept utterly ridiculous. Panthers running back Christian McCaffrey, who led all running backs with 27 votes, also led all flex players with 18 votes. This season, McCaffrey became the third player in NFL history behind Roger Craig and Marshall Faulk, to gain 1,000 rushing yards and 1,000 receiving yards in the same season.
But what’s the point in having him finish first in two different categories? McCaffrey had 924 of his snaps in the backfield this season, 66 in the slot, and 47 out wide. Do we just assume that he was in a receiver position more often than that because he’s such a prolific receiver? Or, should we recognize that he’s a marvelous running back with an insane ability to create in the passing game from the backfield, give him 18 more running back votes, and give the flex love to true hybrid players like slot receivers who also work outside a ton, or running backs who have more than X number of true receiver snaps.
Do the same with the “defensive back” position.
Remember when we were discussing the need to align these positions with the modern NFL? Perhaps the nebulous “defensive back” position was created to give slot defenders the recognition they deserve in a league where, outside of the aforementioned Seahawks, about 70% of the NFL’s defensive snaps are with at least five defensive backs. But Baltimore’s Marcus Peters and Marlon Humphrey tied for the lead in this position with seven votes each. Peters played exactly 70 of his 988 defensive snaps in the slot this season; Humphrey played 546 out of his 998 snaps there.
So, what kind of hybrid defensive back are we calling Peters? Are we saying that he’s multi-positional because he played for both the Rams and Ravens this season? We honestly have no clue. Denver defensive back Justin Simmons, who got nine well-deserved votes as one of the NFL’s best safeties this season, also got one “defensive backs” vote when he’s also been one of the league’s most effective slot defenders. It seems that this position has become a deposit box for voters who really aren’t sure which defensive backs do what.
Tennessee’s Logan Ryan, tied for the lead among slot defenders with three interceptions this season, received four “defensive back” votes. Tampa Bay rookie Sean Murphy-Bunting, who also has three picks from the slot this season, received none. Again, what exactly are we doing here? We are not reading metrics and aligning them with tape, for one thing. Make this position about guys who excel in the slot, and if their names cross over into the cornerback and safety positions, it had better mean something.
Each of these votes, and each of these positions, had better mean something. That they don’t at this point indicates a flawed process that could easily be fixed.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”
