Ranking the NFL's best defensive play callers ahead of the 2022 season

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Credit: Mark Konezny-USA TODAY Sports

By Eric Eager | PFF

We've already written about the league’s best offensive play callers, and included within it is our method for how we come up with the rankings. TL;DR, essentially we use PFF grades, adjusted for opponents and situation, to come up with an expectation for how a team should do on a play — both in terms of expected points added and success rate. Then we take the difference between what actually happened and attribute that to coaching.

We deploy the same approach on for defensive play callers here, but it's just turned it around. Opponent adjustment plays a bigger part in this ranking, as offense is more stable than defense. As such, these rankings change more from year to year.

Be that as it might, those included in the list below have been great defensive play callers by our metrics, and they should continue to be so into the future. As with the offensive play caller piece, we are supplementing our analyses with work from this paper, which we published at this spring’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. ...

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