For most of the season, Pro Football Focus had ranked Cleveland Browns defensive end Jabaal Sheard in their top ten slots when it came to the race for "rookie of the year." In fact, for the first few weeks of the regular season, both Sheard and defensive tackle Phil Taylor were near the top five. Taylor faded quickly, but Sheard stayed up there until a little bit past the half-way point of the season before fading as well. As a result, Sheard was not listed in the PFF's list of top ten rookies. He also wasn't listed on their Rookie All-Pro list, getting beat out by J.J. Watt and Aldon Smith.
The real crime in all of this, though? Left tackle Joe Thomas was not named to PFF's All-Pro team. He wasn't even named to their second-team All-Pro team. Those honors went to Jason Peters of the Eagles and Duane Brown of the Texans. Is it time to stage a boycott? No other Browns were nominated, but close-to-being-acquired defensive tackle Brodrick Bunkley was named a first-teamer due to his stop percentage against the run.
Here's something that might make you happy: Ike Taylor was No. 1 on the top 10 most "toasted" cornerback performances from the past four seasons. It was hard to believe they didn't list Eric Wright's performance against Anquan Boldin in their top 10. No sign of Joe Haden on that list, for obvious reasons.
PFF did offer one statistic to close out the season about a Browns player: "Defensive tackle Ahtyba Rubin had 45 stops on the year, which is eight more than any other defensive/nose tackle."
0 recs | 9 comments
And this is the very top reason why I don’t trust “sabermetrics” for football yet.
Bernie19Kosar - January 10, 2012
Joe was rated pretty low in run blocking.
The Licensed Pessimist - January 10, 2012
Yeah, without seeing their full stats on PFF, I assume this would probably be their reasoning. Thomas’ praise via PFF during the regular season always mentioned how well he did at keeping a premiere pass rusher in check, but seldom mentioned his run blocking.
Chris Pokorny - January 10, 2012
This could be my memory playing tricks on me, but under Mangini it seems like whenever we ran to the left we got pretty good yardage with Joe leading the way. I don’t want to bring up any of the Mangini baggage, and I could very well be wrong, but that seemed to stand out to me in those two seasons.
Legoman0721 - January 11, 2012 via Android app
Are there any kind of stats on how much we ran to the left this year?
JustBob - January 11, 2012
They probably confused him with our fullback.
rufio - January 12, 2012
haden was eighth on their “sophomore superstars” list, honoring the best players of the 2010 draft class, not bad for the number 7 overall pick
brandeezy09 - January 12, 2012
Couple of comments:
1. Love Sheard but those 2 guys in front of him deserved it. They are monsters – basically Sheard with more size on strength. Watt especially freakish.
2. Is our medical staff trying to screw us? In addition to our past medical issues – they flunked Bunkley on a 5th round trade and he turns out a 1st teamer? Heads need to roll.
realmccoy - January 12, 2012 via mobile
I’m pretty sure that Bunkley didn’t want to come here, but I could be wrong.
Bernie19Kosar - January 14, 2012
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