It was a tumultuous 2024 season for 24-year-old cornerback Sauce Gardner, ripe with social media drama and outside criticism. When it was all said and done, though, the New York Jets star put up numbers that are a far cry from what you’d expect based on the vitriol he received.
When discussing Gardner, it is important to remember just how unfathomably high he set the bar for himself over his first two seasons. It can be argued that no cornerback – perhaps no player – in NFL history set a higher bar to begin their career.
Not only was Gardner a first-team All-Pro in each of his first two seasons, but he garnered more first-place votes across those two seasons than any other cornerback – more than twice as many, to be precise.
Most votes for first-team All-Pro among outside cornerbacks, 2022-23 (out of a possible 100):
- Sauce Gardner, 63
- DaRon Bland, 28
- Patrick Surtain, 25
- Jaire Alexander, 16
- Jaylon Johnson, 15
Gardner was the consensus No. 1 cornerback in the NFL before he turned 24.
That is a ridiculously high bar for any player to maintain, let alone a 24-year-old. While Gardner did not reach that bar in 2024, he still had a strong season that would be viewed as a career year for many other cornerbacks.
According to Pro Football Focus, these are Gardner’s final coverage statistics in 2024:
- 15 games
- 490 coverage snaps
- 47 targets
- 25 receptions
- 391 yards
- 1 touchdown
- 1 interception
This stat line puts him in the top 20% among qualified cornerbacks in multiple important metrics. Gardner’s 0.8 yards allowed per cover snap ranked 16th-lowest out of 96 qualifiers, while his 79.3 passer rating allowed ranked 17th-lowest.
Of course, those numbers don’t live up to his own standards; both are career lows. Nonetheless, that’s pretty darn great for a “down year.”
While they received a fraction of the attention as his lowlights, there are still plenty of highlights to be found on Gardner’s 2024 tape.
On top of his solid overall coverage metrics, Gardner remained one of the best on-ball disruptors in the NFL, if not the best.
PFF tracks a stat called “forced incompletions,” which essentially takes the traditional “passes defended” stat one step further. It gives defenders credit for forcing an incompletion with tight coverage even if they did not get official credit for deflecting the pass.
Gardner tied for seventh among cornerbacks with 12 forced incompletions. He did this despite facing the 82nd-most targets (47). With 12 forced incompletions on just 47 targets, Gardner led all qualified cornerbacks with a forced incompletion rate of 25.5%. This is almost identical to his rate from 2022-23 (25.0%).
Areas to improve
While Gardner finished with a much stronger output in coverage than many gave him credit for, the story of his 2024 season cannot be told without acknowledging the areas where he faltered.
The most common criticism of Gardner was his tackling. There is no disputing that he struggled in this area. He had a career-high missed tackle rate of 17.5%, per PFF, which ranked 80th out of 96 qualified cornerbacks.
Gardner’s poor tackling was among the main reasons why his coverage stats fell from his league-best standards. As a result of his missed tackles, Gardner allowed a career-high 4.7 YAC per reception, a 47% increase over his previous career average (3.2). Without the missed tackles leading to oodles of YAC, Gardner’s overall coverage production would have been much closer to his usual standards.
While tackling was an issue for Gardner in the pass game, his tackling was more problematic in the run game. Six of Gardner’s 10 missed tackles came against the run. His 23.1% missed tackle rate against the run ranked eighth-worst among the 79 cornerbacks who played at least 200 run defense snaps.
Even when Gardner did make tackles against the run, opponents often dragged him for chunks of extra yardage after contact. It felt like Gardner was a significant contributor to the overall softness of the Jets’ run defense, which finished 20th in DVOA.
Penalties were another problem. Gardner had a career-high 10 after only having five in each of his first two seasons. Perhaps this was a result of the widespread narrative that Gardner got away with some flags earlier in his career, leading to overcorrection from the officials. Either way, it’s a number Gardner will want to shrink in 2025.
Gardner is not in a bad spot, but must hold himself accountable to bounce back
Throughout the 2024 season, Gardner occasionally seemed to lack accountability for his areas of weakness.
In November, Gardner posted (and deleted) a tweet where he deflected blame from himself for New York’s blowout loss in Arizona, arguing his missed tackle against Cardinals tight end Trey McBride was not the reason for the defeat. Before that game, he attempted to excuse his tackling woes by claiming “people don’t understand” teams were forcing him to make “more tackling attempts,” which is false.
These quotes were troubling. They suggested that the young corner may have been blind to his own shortcomings, in which case it would be difficult for him to bounce back.
Fortunately, Gardner has shown noticeable maturation since then. At his season-end press conference, Gardner gave a much different perspective on his performance.
“I feel like it was really OK. Obviously, there’s no secret. The standard that I have for myself and set for myself is on a different level. And that’s just me being my biggest critic. Even my season this year is not at my standard, but it would be an elite season, depending on who you’re talking about,” said Gardner.
“Obviously, I had a lot of missed tackles, and I’m gonna clean that up this offseason. In terms of coverage, like coverage, I did pretty good…but you know, I feel like it was OK.”
Based on the numbers we read today, that is an extremely accurate and self-aware description of Gardner’s season. He acknowledged that his performance was far from the standard he holds himself to, even if it was respectable and would be viewed as, in his words, an “elite season” for other corners. Gardner also took accountability for his tackling without making excuses, promising to clean it up.
The authenticity of Gardner’s summary is admirable. He could have gone the route of beating himself up, claiming he was terrible, but we know that isn’t true. He was exactly what he said he was: “OK,” at least when judging by his standards.
When you’re a cornerback, confidence is utterly essential (more than any other position), so it’s a positive that Gardner still has enough confidence to acknowledge that he played “pretty good,” even if he knows he can be much better. No team wants a defeated cornerback, and Gardner remains far from that, yet, simultaneously, he has developed the accountability he was lacking earlier in the year.
This is a blend that will take Gardner far. Still as confident as ever but also finally owning up to his mistakes rather than deflecting them, Gardner seems to be in the right headspace for a resurgent season in 2025.
