With the NFL regular season moving into a phase, where all games seem to be of higher magnitude and teams are trying to make a playoff push, I wanted to take a look at the league’s landscape and where I’d rank all 32 squads heading into week 13. All those teams, which are currently part of the playoff picture or in the hunt, have crucial matchups coming up on their schedule and a lot of them still play each other to determine who will be there in the end. I’d like to point out at this point, that standings are secondary and that this list is about how well teams are playing as of right now.
Monthly Archives: November 2017
Best duos in today’s NFL
Everybody loves a good one-two-punch. After declaring Jacksonville’s Jalen Ramsey and A.J. Bouye as the league’s best cornerback-duo in my position rankings a week ago, I thought about who the best tandems at all the other positions are. Obviously, this list only includes pairs players, who are on the field at the same time or alternate heavily. So you won’t find any quarterbacks here. Neither did I mention any combination of tight-ends since very little teams use multiple TE-sets, at least in the passing game, anymore. To make this list, both players have to be active right now. This led to two dynamic duos not making the cut. I also mentioned a couple of challengers for the group after each paragraph. Here’s what I came up with:
Top 10 cornerbacks through the first ten weeks:
The position fans have the hardest time comparing players to each other and ranking them accordingly is cornerback. When people reach outside linebacker nominees in the Pro Bowl voting they look who has the most sacks and with defensive backs the number of interceptions is often the deciding factor. It’s just not that easy. To grade cornerbacks you have to watch the tape and understand their responsibility in the respective schemes. On film you can see if their coverage was that good the opposing quarterback didn’t want to throw their way, what position they were in prior to the pass, how they competed when the ball was in the air and which plays they were responsible for giving up. After watching multiple games of the best corners in the league, I decided to rank the top ten at the position up to this point of the season. This is an evaluation over a span of ten weeks, not who I think are the best in general. So some guys who have proven over time they are worthy of a spot didn’t make the cut, because they haven’t played at the level they are capable of. Here’s my list:
College Football Top 25:
With another crazy week of college football, which included four of the top 13 teams in the country losing, I decided to make my own top 25 rankings. I largely agree with the top ten of the CFP and AP lists, I just flipped around numbers six to eight a bit. After that, I trust what I see when I put on the games each Saturday (and when I study the tape throughout the week). Of course I also have to take an outlook for each program into consideration as well, because I just can’t put any two-loss team from the Power Five, which doesn’t even have a chance to play in the conference championship game, above one who still basically controls their own destiny and has a chance to leave a mark on me and the committee. Without further ado, here’s my list:
What we’ve learned over the first half of the 2017 NFL season:
With eight weeks and the trade deadline in the books, there’s plenty of perceptions and realizations around the league. I tried to sum up these developments in twelve observations, I believe to be true. Not everybody will agree with all of them, but I trust what I see with my eyes and I’ll try to make you by what you read here.
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