despite losing Johnson to retirement and seeing both Ebron and their

Stars arent enough to win in the NFL. Elite players such as?Cam Newton?and?Von Miller are essential to make a playoff run, but because of the level of attrition and player rotation in the NFL, teams inevitably have to rely on untested players and reserves to excel in smaller roles.Remember that the Patriots benched nickel corner?Kyle Arrington in Super Bowl XLIX because he was ineffective and overmatched against Seahawks WR/special-teamer Chris Matthews. The guy who entered the lineup in Arringtons place was Malcolm Butler. The Patriots sure are happy they had him.When New England lost Darrelle Revis and Brandon Browner in free agency the following offseason, Bill Belichick turned to Butler and saw him emerge as one of the leagues better starting cornerbacks. The lesson? Impressive work in a small sample can often highlight players who turn into future starters. Using the numbers compiled by TruMedia and ESPN Stats & Information, I wanted to take a look at some of the players who have stood out in relatively few snaps as a possible future indicator that theyll grow into larger roles.Of course, were only three games into the 2016 campaign, so those numbers arent especially robust. Ive gone back through the 2015 season and calculated performance on a per-snap basis for a number of statistics. Ill run through them all below. Lets start on the defensive side of the ball and go from there.Pass rushingPlenty of organizations use situational edge rushers in other obvious passing situations. In many cases, those part-time forces of destruction turn into every-down starters, with defensive linemen such as?Jabaal Sheard and Carlos Dunlap as recent examples. Who could be the next players to do the same? Lets use snaps per sack -- with snaps in this case representing exclusively pass plays, and 200 snaps being the baseline -- to see who takes down opposing quarterbacks most frequently.The top of the list is almost exclusively stars:?Ezekiel Ansah (28.4),?DeMarcus Ware (28.7) and?J.J. Watt?(34.8). The first part-time player on the list is veteran?Dwight Freeney, who excelled for the Cardinals last year and picked up his ninth sack since the beginning of last season in Atlantas win over New Orleans on Monday night. With 278 chances at a takedown, he is averaging one sack for every 30.9 opportunities.The most prominent name among the younger part-time players on the list is probably?Shane Ray, the Broncos 2015 first-rounder who had three sacks starting for the injured Ware on Sunday. He now has a sack once every 36.9 chances as a pro. Danielle Hunter, chosen by the Vikings in the third round of that same draft, has taken down opposing passers at an identical rate. Nick Perry of the Packers, who was once seen as a bust after being taken in the first round, has sacked opposing passers once every 38.3 snaps. Players such as?Jacquies Smith, Armonty Bryant?and Lorenzo Mauldin are also under 50 pass plays per sack.For reference, an every-down edge player such as?Khalil Mack will get just under 600 pass-rushing opportunities per 16 games (minus those plays in which he drops back into coverage, which we cant account for). A regular starter who gets rotated out of the game is more likely to get 500 chances to sack the quarterback. Hunter has produced nine sacks in 332 chances. If he kept that up over a full season, that would be 13.5 sacks. Not bad, right?A better metric of pass-rush performance is quarterback knockdowns, which is tracked by official NFL scorers. Watt perennially leads this category, including last season, when he had 50 and nobody else had more than 37. Watt knocked down opposing quarterbacks once every 12 chances; the only player who got to passers more frequently with a minimum of 200 chances was Ansah, who was at 11.4 snaps per hit.Again, the league leaders in snaps per QB hit are who youd expect: Aaron Donald, Ware, and Giants big-money signing Olivier Vernon are just behind Ansah and Watt. Injured front-seven pieces Desmond Bryant (Browns) and Pernell McPhee (Bears) are also in the top 12. The first true part-time player who fits the sort of young asset were looking for is Carolinas Mario Addison, who knocks the quarterback down once every 18.4 chances.Addison is tied with Mauldin and Robert Ayers, now on the Buccaneers, at 18.4 snaps per hit. Rotation players and backups just behind them include Arizonas Frostee Rucker (18.9 snaps per hit), burgeoning Ravens star Timmy Jernigan (20.0), suspended 49ers edge rusher Aaron Lynch (20.3), and anonymous Vikings defensive tackle Tom Johnson, who at age 32 is one of the most underpaid veterans in football. Johnson has 26 hits in 531 chances, giving him a similar knockdown rate (20.4) to Muhammad Wilkerson (21.3). Johnson is in the second season of a three-year, $7 million contract.Breakout candidate: Danielle Hunter. While Hunter is nominally the reserve end behind Everson Griffen and Brian Robison, hes already playing nearly 56 percent of the snaps this season, and its a matter of time before he works his way ahead of Robison into the starting lineup. Hunter has already accrued three sacks this year as part of a devastating Vikings front seven, and truthfully, the hardest thing he might have to do is beat Griffen & Co. to the opposing quarterback.SecondaryIn terms of defensive backs, theres one enormous outlier and everybody else. I tracked how defensive backs performed on pass plays as I did for pass-rushers, but this time, I left out plays ending in sacks.Lets start with interceptions, where Kansas Citys Marcus Peters is rightfully getting plaudits as a ballhawk. Defensive backs who rack up a lot of interceptions in a given season rarely hit those same heights the following year, but Peters looks like the exception to that rule. With some help from Jets quarterback?Ryan Fitzpatrick, Peters has followed his eight-interception season as a rookie in 2015 with four interceptions in three games this year, including two in last weeks win over the Jets. On a per-play basis, Peters is intercepting 1.7 percent of the pass attempts while hes on the field. Thats impressive.Theres one player who might be even more outstanding, though. Jets defensive back Marcus Williams has been a part-time player under Todd Bowles over the past two seasons, but he has been ridiculously productive. Williams has eight interceptions since the start of the 2015 season despite lining up for just 249 pass attempts, about 34 percent of Peters opportunities. He has intercepted 3.1 percent of the passes he has seen since the beginning of last season. To put that in perspective: You know how Peters has 12 interceptions over that timespan? If Williams played the same number of snaps and intercepted throws at the same rate he has with the Jets, he would have?22 picks. Thats unreal.To use a raw number representing a typical workload, Williams is intercepting 16 passes per 500 pass attempts faced. After Williams and Peters, theres a huge drop-off to free-agent corner Trumaine McBride (6.3 picks per 500 attempts), Raiders safety Reggie Nelson (6.1), and Rams corner Trumaine Johnson (5.9). Peters former teammate in Kansas City, Marcus Cooper, has 8.8 interceptions per 500 attempts in a much smaller sample.If we change it up and look at passes broken up (or defensed), the leader is Raiders cornerback David Amerson, who was cut by Washington last September and caught on with Oakland, where he immediately settled in as a starter and played at a high level the rest of the way. Amerson has broken up 26 passes in 620 attempts since the start of 2015, good for a 4.2 percent breakup rate. That paces the field, with Texans star Johnathan Joseph?behind him?(3.5 percent).Bills starters Stephon Gilmore and Ronald Darby also come in above 3 percent, a testament to both of their abilities and the style of play Rex Ryan looks for in his cornerbacks. Injured Saints CB?Delvin Breaux also came in at 3 percent for his work last season. The only backup defensive back above 3 percent is Pierre Desir, who was cut by the Browns at the end of training camp and is currently playing special teams for the Chargers. Josh Norman?is at 2.9 percent, along with Cardinals special-teams star Justin Bethel, who was a mess as a regular cornerback last year. San Francisco 49ers reserve corner Dontae Johnson is at 2.8 percent.Breakout candidate: Marcus Williams. It has to be Williams, who has been the ballhawk of all ballhawks as a reserve. His role has expanded this season with Antonio Cromartie leaving town, as he has gone from playing about 27 percent of the snaps last year to 67 percent so far in 2016. Darrelle Revis hasnt slipped as much as some circles might want you to believe, so while Williams is going to end up as a starter somewhere, it might not be in New York. Expect Williams to attract attention when he hits unrestricted free agency after the 2017 season.ReceivingLets finish up by taking a look at the receivers who make the most out of their opportunities. TruMedia tracks the number of routes run by each receiver. While some receivers are fruitlessly running decoys on a given play, if a guy repeatedly manages to get open, chances are that hes going to see the football sooner rather than later. We can track which receivers are thrown the ball most frequently in terms of routes run, and then which of those receivers actually produce catches.After Monday night, there are a pair of players tied for percentage of targets per route run since the beginning of 2015. The Monday night mention makes it easy to guess the identity of one of the players. Indeed, its Julio Jones, who caught just one pass but was thrown seven targets on 26 routes. Jones targeting percentage is down from a mammoth 2015, but since last September, Matt Ryan has looked Jones way 32 percent of the time Jones has run a pass pattern.The guy who is tied with him? Its not Antonio Brown, who is third at 31.5 percent. Its not a big-name wideout such as?Mike Evans or Steve Smith Sr., who round out the top five among players who have run 200 routes or more. Its Lions halfback Theo Riddick, who is a focal point of the Lions offense under Jim Bob Cooter. Cooter has emphasized shorter, safer throws for Matthew Stafford, and despite sharing a field with a number of talented receivers, Riddick has been a cornerstone. Since Cooter took over midway through last season, no player in football with 200 patterns or more has been targeted on a higher percentage of his pass patterns than Riddick.Just about every wideout getting force-fed the ball is either an every-down star or a player who has been unavailable for stretches of the last year-plus, such as Steve Smith Sr., Martavis Bryant?and Dez Bryant. One interesting pattern that pops up is with Carolinas offense. There are 25 wide receivers who have been targeted on 23 percent or more of their routes since the beginning of 2015. Three of them -- Ted Ginn Jr., Devin Funchess?and Jerricho Cotchery -- are (or were) on the Panthers. Theyre by far the least notable receivers of the 25, too. My best interpretation of their spots on the list is that the Panthers do a good job of rotating their receivers in and out during games, and when theyre on the field and running routes, theyre generally getting open for throws.The wideouts who get the most receptions per route run are those who generally run a lot of hitches and catch a lot of screens, a group led by Brown (21.5 percent) and followed by Jones, Keenan Allen, Steve Smith Sr. and Jarvis Landry. Brown and Jones also do more work downfield, obviously. Slot receivers such as?Cole Beasley and Danny Amendola sneak onto this list, and again, the one player above 15 percent who doesnt seem to fit is Cotchery, who caught passes on 16.5 percent of the routes he ran last year.The target hog at tight end is Jordan Reed, who broke out in spectacular fashion last year and formed an immediate bond with Kirk Cousins. Twenty-eight percent of Reeds routes resulted in a target last year, with 20.9 percent of those routes producing catches. He led the league in both categories. Delanie Walker, Greg Olsen?and Rob Gronkowski unsurprisingly were among the league leaders in both as well.If youre looking for a backup or two among the ranks, its not quite as easy. Clive Walford of the Raiders is probably the best example, given that the Raiders generally use blocking tight end Lee Smith as their starter. Walford has been targeted on 21.4 percent of his routes, 13th among tight ends with 200 routes or more over the timespan. The Giants combo of Larry Donnell and Will Tye each rank among the top 15 in terms of catches per route run, turning 14.3 and 14.2 percent of their routes, respectively, into receptions. The Bears?Zach Miller, who was a backup before taking over for the injured and then traded Martellus Bennett in Chicago, is 11th at 15.6 percent.At running back, the receiving backs you unquestionably know and love in PPR fantasy leagues are prevalent. After Riddick, the most-targeted back on a per-route basis is Darren Sproles, followed by Charles Sims, James White?and Bilal Powell, all of whom are targeted between 28 and 29 percent of the time when they run routes. One surprise was DeMarco Murray, who is thought of primarily for his running ability. He has been thrown passes on 23.5 percent of his routes. Jeremy Langford and Melvin Gordon are also over 23 percent.Riddick stands alone in terms of turning his routes into receptions. Hes at 26.4 percent and the second-placed Powell is at 21.2 percent. Screen-heavy bigger backs such as?Mark Ingram and James Starks sneak onto this list as well because they catch virtually everything thrown their way. Since Ingram emerged as a regular contributor in 2014, for example, he has caught 82.4 percent of his targets. Riddick, who runs a far wider variety of routes, cant reasonably expect to keep up with that. Hes at 77.4 percent over the same timeframe.Breakout candidate: Clive Walford. Walford is still finding his stride in his second season, but he caught a touchdown pass in Week 2 and should have had another touchdown in Week 3, but it was wiped off the board by a holding penalty on Donald Penn. It takes many talented tight ends a couple of seasons to find their way in the league and become steady targets. Walford has to compete with Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree for targets, but as the Raiders get into more and more shootouts, teams are going to need to start accounting for him. Wholesale Shoes China Store .Y. -- The Buffalo Sabres have recalled forward Kevin Porter and defenceman Chad Ruhwedel from the minors as part of a five-player roster shuffle made by the NHLs worst team. Cheap Adidas Shoes China . Olli Jokinen, Mark Scheifele, and Bryan Little each had a goal and an assist as Winnipeg won 5-2, handing Calgary its record-setting seventh consecutive loss on home ice. http://www.cheapshoeschinaonline.com/cheap-puma-shoes-china-153a.html .com) - The women will also have a new champion at the Australian Open. Cheap Saucony Shoes China . LOUIS -- Theres no telling how these wacky World Series games will end. Cheap Salomon Shoes China . Paul Pierce couldnt believe he missed at the end. Young scored a season-high 26 points to spark a huge effort from the leagues most productive bench, and Los Angeles beat the Brooklyn Nets 99-94 on Wednesday night after blowing a 27-point lead. Who is the best quarterback in the NFL right now? The list of names is pretty familiar, even if each player has some flaws. Cam Newton?is the defending MVP, although his play has dropped off dramatically in 2016. Russell Wilson was phenomenal during the second half of 2015, but likewise, he has suffered a bit this year with a coalescing offensive line and a knee injury. Ben Roethlisberger is injured. Tom Brady is, you know, Tom Brady, but he was suspended for four games after the Deflategate scandal. Aaron Rodgers is struggling.I named Matt Ryan as my quarter-season MVP, and think you can make a case for Ryan, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Andrew Luck?or Derek Carr as being worthy of consideration, if not necessarily the honor itself. I am going to throw another name out there, though: What Matthew Stafford has done over the past season of football deserves to put him in the discussion.The phrase under the radar is always silly when it comes to the NFL because nothing about football is underreported, but Stafford has hit a new level over the past 16 games, a stretch that coincides with the promotion of Lions quarterback coach Jim Bob Cooter to offensive coordinator after Joe Lombardi was fired. Staffords previous offensive coordinators, in awe of his prototypical arm strength, had built offenses designed to stretch teams downfield with throws to Calvin Johnson. With Megatron taking a step backward thanks to injuries and the Detroit offensive line undergoing construction, Lombardi began to build a scheme designed to get the ball out quicker and create throws that utilized Staffords arm strength for short-distance accuracy. Cooter has taken those concepts to another level.You can see the difference between what Stafford has done under Lombardi and Cooter in two GIFs. Thanks to TruMedia, here are the plots of every Stafford pass under Lombardi (from 2014 until his firing in 2015) and Cooter (in the 16 games since). They look reasonably similar:Now, lets look at those same plots again in terms of efficiency with a pass grid showing his passer rating in various quadrants of the field. Red means Stafford was better than league average (hot) in the respective zone, while blue means Stafford was worse. This one makes Staffords improvements under Cooter quite obvious:The difference is staggering. And the results have been noticeable. Stafford has put together an All-Pro caliber season over his past 16 games. He has completed nearly 69 percent of his passes, while throwing for 4,310 yards, with 35 touchdowns against just eight picks. The shorter passes have crucially cut into Staffords interception rate, which had been his biggest problem. Through the end of the 2014 season, Staffords career interception rate was 2.7 percent. Since Cooters promotion, Staffords INT rate has been nearly halved, dropping to 1.4 percent.In terms of rate statistics, Staffords résumé is as good as anybody elses in football. Comparing him to the other qualifying passers (224 attempts or more) since Week 8 of last season, Stafford ranks near the league leaders in most categories:QBR rewards passers who throw passes farther downfield, but likely underestimates just how hyper-efficient Stafford has been throwing a steady diet of shorter throws. The only quarterback throwing shorter passes than Stafford over the past year has been Teddy Bridgewater, and the only quarterback who has put a higher percentage of his passes on target has been Sam Bradford. Other quarterbacks have similar passing profiles, but Stafford has been more accurate than just about anybody else in the league.Check out that drop percentage, too. Despite throwing a ton of short passes on target, Stafford hasnt gotten a lot of help from his receivers. Theyre dropping 5.6 percent of his passes, which is absurd; the only passer with a higher drop percentage over the same time frame is Blaine Gabbert. The league-average drop rate is 3.9 percent. Give Stafford a league-average drop rate, turn those drops into his typical completed pass (which generates a little over 11 yards), and hes completing 70.3 percent of his throws and averaging 7.7 yards per attempt. His passer rating hops up to 107.6, leapfrogging Brees and trailing only Wilson, both of whom have drop rates below the league average.Its important to bring up his teammates, of course, because Staffords career has often been defined or analyzed through the lens of his best teammate, Johnson. Even when Stafford played well, there was a perception (and at times a reality) that he was being bailed out by one of the greatest receivers ever. Golden Tates success on arrival helped matters, but the specter of Megatron still loomed over everything Stafford accomplished.Now, though, Johnson is gone. Stafford is doing this with Tate, Marvin Jones, the 36-year-old Anquan Boldin, and Theo Riddick. Hell get Eric Ebron back eventually, and the tight end the Lions famously chose over Odell Beckham Jr. and Aaron Donald may be a useful weapon, but nobody in this group is a Hall of Famer. Riddick was a sixth-round pick. Tate, Jones and Boldin all arrived in town and have been more productive and impactful than they were in their previous stops. The Lions havent skipped a beat despite losing Johnson to retirement and seeing both Ebron and their top two running backs (Riddick and Ameer Abdullah) goo down with injuries.dddddddddddd Stafford is making the guys around him better.Hes also not getting much help from his defense. The Lions D was dead last in DVOA heading into this week. Theyve allowed only 23.2 points per game since Lombardi left, but that has been in part because Staffords offense has been super-efficient. The offense has scored on a higher percentage of its drives than any team outside of the Panthers, turned the ball over less frequently than anyone besides the Bills and Patriots, and has handed the defense the leagues ninth-best average starting field position.The defense has responded with the NFLs eighth-worst three-and-out percentage, the fifth-worst takeaway rate, and the worst touchdown rate in the red zone by far. Detroit has allowed opponents to score touchdowns on 77.1 percent of their red zone drives over the past 16 games, with the league average at 56.4 percent and the 31st-ranked Saints at 70.5 percent. When youre worse than the Saints at something on defense, something has gone horribly wrong.The same unit that cost the Lions a win by failing to properly defend an Aaron Rodgers Hail Mary last season has been dangerously ineffective in the fourth quarter this year. The Lions defense has blown five fourth-quarter leads this season, including three double-digit leads and two separate leads against the Colts in Week 1. Consequently, each of Detroits victories this year has required Stafford to score a touchdown to either reclaim the lead or break a tie in the fourth quarter.On Sunday, Detroit led 13-3 with 13 minutes to go and had a win expectancy of nearly 94 percent, only for the defense to allow consecutive touchdown drives of 75 and 76 yards to Kirk Cousins, who kept the ball on a read-option play for the first time this year and sprinted past Kerry Hyder for a 19-yard score to put Washington up 17-13 with 1:13 left. Washingtons win expectancy there is 99.5 percent, but Stafford promptly drove the Lions 75 yards in 43 seconds for a miraculous victory.The other historic knock on Stafford has been his salary. Stafford entered the league as a first overall pick in the era of the old collective bargaining agreement, which yielded a seven-year, $72 million deal with $41.7 million in guarantees in an era where that was top quarterback money. Thanks to subpar cap management and repeated restructures, Staffords rookie deal accelerated such that the Lions had to offer the former Georgia star a three-year, $53 million extension before 2013 to create more cap room. In part, Staffords salary (and the cap mismanagement, the larger culprit of the two) helped push Ndamukong Suh out of Detroits price range when the defensive tackle left for Miami in free agency.The rest of the league has caught up, and the Lions have done a better job managing their cap in recent years, but Staffords 2016 cap hit is $22.5 million, the fifth-highest figure in football. In years past, it was fair to wonder whether Stafford was actually a net positive for the Lions, given that he was being paid like a top quarterback and performing closer to a league-average starter. Now, though, Stafford is providing return on investment for Detroit. Hes likely to negotiate a new extension this offseason with the final year of his deal coming due in 2018, and on this form, Stafford will deserve the mammoth extension he is sure to receive.Theres a lesson to be learned here: We are almost definitely too confident in how we assess players and their level of play. This is really the third version of Stafford. There was the guy who couldnt stay healthy his first two seasons behind a terrible offensive line. Then there was the Stafford we knew between 2011 and the middle of 2015, the guy who would throw a ton of passes and mix highlight-reel throws with backbreaking interceptions and ill-fated decisions in the fourth quarter, delivering roughly league-average play on the whole. (Never mind that he led the league with five fourth-quarter comeback wins in 2014.)The Stafford weve seen over the past 16 games has been another quarterback entirely. And hes not the first player to take a sudden leap after previously establishing a distinct level of play. Think about Andy Dalton, who was just good enough to be disappointing in Cincinnati before putting together one of the best seasons in football in 2015 and building on it by being just as good in 2016. Or consider Bradford, who might have struggled Sunday against the Eagles but has otherwise excelled during Minnesotas 5-1 start after years of mediocrity.Bradford could go bad -- it has been only four impressive games for him -- and both Dalton and Stafford could regress to their prior selves. At the same time, though, the fact that each has been able to pull this for full seasons is telling in itself. Context and situation is everything in the NFL. Brady can look like a fool for a night in Kansas City behind a terrible offensive line and win a Super Bowl four months later. Rodgers can look unbeatable for a year and turn ordinary overnight. We dont think of Stafford as a superstar because of his past, but with each passing week, the evidence continues to suggest that Cooters promotion has him playing like one. ' ' '