Be a great FA signing at a position the Jets haven't had a good player in a long time. https://www.ganggreennation.com/202...als-edge-carl-lawson-makes-sense-for-the-jets
Sounds good and all and he's young. He still only had 5.5 sacks last year. "Slow starter" and only started three games in three years means he wasn't good enough to get on the field. What kind of dumb "analytic" is this and why is it a good thing? So Hendrickson and Ngakoue faced more chips and double teams and had more sacks than him anyways? These so called analytics are getting ridiculous.
There’s some analytics you can certainly turn your head away from and not bother to use. But I feel some like the pass rush grade by PFF for example better then the “quality” of sack per se. I’d def offer Lawson a nice 3 year deal, he’d wouldn’t command a ton of money unlike what YN would ask for. Plus I really like his explosiveness. You’d be paying moreso his potential which would be a risk but I feel Lawson can potentially be a 10+ sack guy.
Is he a good fit under Saleh’ s alignment? whatever JD does for getting an edge we desperately need doesn’t turn out to be a Vernon Gholston.
I think athletically he checks the boxes. Saleh and JD would have to come together to see if he’s worth being a guy you can feel be a legit threat off the edge consistently. JD has his grading system with these guys, let’s see if he’s on the Jets radar.
This guy is Calvin Pace. We've been down that rabbit hole once before. Pay a guy like he is an elite edge only to discover that he is a good edge w/o the key ability that edges bring - which is lots of sacks. Every year he is a solid player on the field and a weight on the cap. There's a reason the Bengals did not lock him up or franchise him. The grass is not as green when you are on the same side of the fence as he is.
It seems to me that most sacks come when a blitzer isn't picked up OR the coverage takes away the initial reads and the pocket begins to collapse, at which point the QB tries to find space and walks right into the path of a lucky pass rusher who was fully engaged with a blocker a moment before. So it may be hard to discern exactly what "beating" 1-on-1 pass pro looks like, but I think it's safe to say that most sacks don't come this way. They certainly don't come by beating TWO blockers straight up. A talent evaluator making $100M decisions won't grade every QB INT equally. He'll look at which balls went through the hands of receivers, which were hail marys, etc. This makes perfect sense. So why grade every sack equally if you don't have to? Anyway, fans can happily ignore these analytics if they don't like them. cliffs: Beating straight-up 1-on-1 pass protection for a clean sack is absolutely a high quality play.
Calvin Pace was a perfect scheme fit, and had a long and productive run here. I’d say that’s an example of a good sign.
The Jets paid him like a star and had to keep him for a couple of extra years because his cap hit was too much to cut until it had unfolded from all the restructures. You have to look at him from the perspective of what the Jets could have done with that cap space over the years he was with us. 6.5 sacks a year wasn't the ideal answer. Note that he was a Jet for 8 seasons and never made a pro bowl, despite being paid like a pro bowler for most of his career.
His first season here alone he had 80 tackles which is a ton for a 3-4 OLB, 11 TFL, and 7 sacks. He was excellent at setting the edge, critical in Rex's schemes, and made big plays in big moments. Better overall player than Abraham, who was an undependable one trick pony that everyone seems to reference as the measure on OLB. That's a very good signing. Bit of any overpay? Sure. Only way you are getting more production for much cheaper is a guy on their rookie deal, who eventually gets paid huge as well. Once this team gets way better at drafting, you spend big on re-signing rather than putting their dollars in FA. But we are way away from that, with Douglas having gutted the team there isn't anyone to re-sign right now.
I understand what they're getting at and was being partly facetious with my post. These aren't blitzing inside linebackers we're talking about though where they're accumulating larger sack numbers as free runners up the A gap because of a good blitz scheme. At the end of the day, is the guy getting to the quarterback or not? If he was such a good edge rusher he wouldn't have such a high "pressure" rate with something like 64 pressures I think I read and only close the deal 5.5 times. The Bengals had the lowest sack total in the NFL last year and we're 26th in 2019, 28th in 2018, and fairly highly ranked in 2017 (his rookie year). Mind you, this article makes the excuse that he's a slow starter which is why he couldn't get on the field in two of the three years that the Bengals had one of the leagues worst past rush? To your point though, not all pressures are created the same too. I'm not against signing him, but I am against buying high on speculation of what he could become. And it seems like a team will have to do that to sign him. On a deeper dive, 3.5 of Lawson's 5.5 sacks came against three of the worst pass protecting offenses in the league. 2 against Philly (worst), 1 against Washington (30th), 0.5 against Jacksonville (26th).
This is my concern as well. On one hand he will be playing next to Quinen, which is a lot better player than he's used to. But on the other hand a large part of his production is against very bad lines. And he's never had a great year. Now his qb hits are great, led the league last year. So he could up his game. Also Saleh could easily coach him over the top. But it's a big gamble.
Pace was a good player for us. Overpaid, yes, but he was a set it and forget type of guy where you could pencil him in as the starter and not have to worry about the position.
