A look at the Packers’ results over the past few years shows a correlation to the team’s talent at wideout. One of the great quests of football analytics is to come up with a good way to compare the values of positions in the NFL. This is quite difficult, and there is shockingly little consensus as to just what makes an offense or defense tick. In 2006 Michael Lewis  followed up “Moneyball” with “The Blind Side,” which blended the story of offensive tackle Michael Oher  with support for the notion that left tackles were extremely important, perhaps second only to the quarterbacks they protect. Subsequent research, however, has shown that sacks correlate more with who the quarterback  is than who is playing on the line.


45 of the 53 sacks allowed by #Packers  this season were OVER 2.5 seconds... https://t.co/HnNpOBYJPJ  pic.twitter.com/svtVmTeEVY — Ben Fennell (@BenFennell_NFL) January 3, 2019 



I don’t doubt that left tackle is extremely important, but it’s probably not as important as Lewis ’s book posited.
There are also a lot of very smart analysts and thinkers who claim that pass rush is the most important aspect of defense, and that edge rushers are consequently the most important players on defense. This makes a lot of sense intuitively, but there is some research that suggests the secondary actually aids the pass rush  more than pass rush aids the secondary, which would make corners more important. I happen to believe that corner is more important in the current NFL, but I could be wrong, and in reality you need both aspects to succeed for a defense to succeed.
The various pieces of a football team work as an integrated unit, and it’s difficult to analyze those pieces as separate entities, but even though we don’t know everything, we do know a few things.

PaulNoonan  wrote: