NY Jets’ Sauce Gardner vs. Patrick Surtain II: Who’s NFL CB1?

From the moment he stepped on the field, Sauce Gardner quickly established himself as one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL. His historic rookie campaign ended with Defensive Rookie of the Year honors, a First-Team All-Pro nod, and eighth in Defensive Player of the Year voting.

Despite not getting an interception, Sauce built on his impressive rookie year, earning his second First-Team All-Pro selection. Unfortunately, Sauce’s third season, along with the rest of the defense, was a bit disappointing.

Context is critical, however, as his “step back” was still an excellent season by most cornerbacks’ standards.

It’s clear that Sauce is an outstanding player. The main question surrounding the New York Jets’ stud cornerback is where he belongs among the league’s best.

That title has generally been reserved for the Denver Broncos’ Patrick Surtain II. Similar to Sauce, Surtain was a top-10 pick and quickly established himself as a top cornerback in the NFL.

It resulted in his market-resetting contract last year before earning the Defensive Player of the Year in 2024.

For this article, I won’t compare Sauce’s 2024 season to Surtain’s. Instead, I will first compare each player’s performances from 2022 to 2024.

Cornerback play fluctuates wildly, so looking over three seasons gives us a better idea of what to expect from the NFL’s top cornerback. For this portion, I will only use Pro Football Focus’s (PFF) data. This is part of a broader analysis I’m doing with the results at defensive tackle already posted here.

Next, I will compare Sauce’s 2023 season to Surtain’s 2024 season. It was a toss-up between his rookie year and 2023, but overall, Sauce’s coverage improved in year two. This portion will tell us how Sauce’s peak compares to the defensive player of the year. For this portion, I will use both PFF, Pro Football Reference, and Player Profiler.com.

Now let’s dive into the numbers and see how it stacks up against the best in the league.

2022 to 2024: Sauce Gardner vs. Patrick Surtain II

Sauce and Surtain have had eerily similar careers since even before they were drafted. Both were viewed as the top cornerbacks pre-draft, but would be the second cornerback selected.

In 2022, they were the two First-Team All-Pros at cornerback and the AFC’s starters in the Pro Bowl. The two years since have seen both players struggle and exceed expectations.

In the end, this is how they stack up:

This part was fun to write as Sauce comes away leading in just about every category.

Sauce dominates in coverage.

Over the last three years, quarterbacks have completed only 50.9% of passes in his direction. Sauce forced the incompletion on half of the passes that went incomplete.

Most surprising is that Sauce has more than double the run stops and the same number of penalties. Given all the discussion, I was surprised that Sauce matched or beat Surtain in each category.

However, Surtain leads in three key areas: Missed tackles, which contribute to number two, run defense grade, and third, interceptions.

None are a considerable shock, but they are unfortunately a big part of what separates elite cornerbacks. PFF doesn’t give many run defense statistics to analyze, so run defense grade is our best metric for almost half of their snaps played.

Despite this, I’d still lean towards Sauce as the better cornerback across the last three seasons. Sauce’s superior coverage is enough to overcome Surtain’s takeaways and better run defense.

Surtain’s 2023 season lowered his performance quite a bit. While Sauce’s haters were quick to pounce on his down year in 2024, Surtain’s slid under the radar. However, Surtain used it as fuel and responded with a dominant season.

The Broncos bet on him, resetting the cornerback market in the summer. And he responded with a defensive player of the year campaign.

Career averages are helpful when comparing players. But the best are measured at their peaks. So let’s compare Sauce’s best year (2023) to Surtain’s award-winning 2024 season.

2023 Sauce Gardner vs DPOY Pat Surtain

How does Sauce’s best season compare to Surtain’s award-winning season? To answer that question, I compared Sauce’s 2023 season to Surtain’s 2024 season.

For this section, I did an even deeper dive, looking at data from three different sources: Pro Football Focus (PFF), Pro Football Reference, and Player Profiler. I did this for a few reasons.

Mainly, it’s challenging to understand responsibilities in zone schemes. This helps remove bias as the data varies and gives us additional advanced statistics. As we’ll see in this section, the results vary more than I would hope.

First up is PFF:

While Sauce had the edge across three seasons, Surtain has the edge at their peaks.

Sauce’s coverage numbers are slightly better, but Surtain’s takeaways give him the edge. This is clearly displayed in Surtain’s massive lead in passer rating despite Sauce’s edge in yardage statistics.

In this analysis, I discovered that PFF is the most “kind” to Sauce. Once I expanded my analysis, the gap only grew.

I looked at Pro Football Reference next. Since they don’t differentiate between coverage and run snaps, I used PFF’s snap information to fill in some spots.

Here are the results:

The most notable difference is that Sauce’s yardage allowed skyrocketed by 84 yards to 332. Meanwhile, Surtain’s only goes up by 8 to 326. Without the yardage advantage, Surtain’s lead only grows.

The last piece of my analysis uses Player Profilers. They provide excellent advanced statistics, such as shadow rate, average separation, and coverage rating.

Unfortunately for Sauce, the final data source makes the gap between him and Surtain grow from a sliver to an ocean:

With Player Profilers, Surtain takes the lead in almost every category. The most staggering difference is in the passer rating allowed.

Surtain’s lead grows by a ridiculous 40 points. Not only that, Surtain shadows opposing receivers on over half of his snaps, while Sauce is just over a third.

While Sauce had a slight edge when comparing the last three seasons, the deeper analysis makes it clear that Surtain was more dominant at his peak. The difference between the two only grew once I added additional data sources to this study.

Now that we have compared the two, what is Sauce missing?

Sauce is missing only one part of the CB game

During my analysis, one thing became increasingly apparent. Interceptions matter.

It’s a notion Jets fans generally don’t like. Not only has Sauce not produced much in this area, but it is also the reason Darrelle Revis was robbed of the DPOY award in 2009.

While Revis still led the league in passer rating allowed, this isn’t the case for Sauce. This is clear when comparing Sauce’s rookie season to his second.

Sauce improved in almost every category except interceptions and completion percentage allowed. However, those two areas are why Sauce’s passer rating allowed was 53.5 in 2022 compared to 76.5 in 2023 (per PFF).

The simplest way to illustrate the difference is with Sauce’s “down” 2024 season. This past year, Sauce allowed a passer rating of 79.3, 24th among 128 qualified cornerbacks.

Despite his struggles, if he snags one more interception, he jumps to the top 10 with 70.1. As discussed at the NFL owners meeting, head coach Aaron Glenn spoke about helping Sauce improve in this area.

While not as critical, Sauce needs to clean up his tackling as well. Sauce actually has more run stops than Surtain. However, his missed tackles cause a massive difference in their run defense grades.

When you miss a sixth of your tackle attempts, teams are more willing to run towards you, which could explain why Sauce has more run stops.

While this area has received much attention after a disastrous 2024 season, I’m not nearly as concerned. Sauce has shown he can tackle reliably before, ranking 10th as a rookie with a 7.6% missed tackle rate. I’m hoping Sauce can at least get to league average under Aaron Glenn.

All in all, Sauce Gardner is one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL. In a disastrous, no good, terrible 2024 season, most metrics still had Sauce as a top 20 cornerback.

The significant change is that when he messed up, he messed up big. Sauce allowed the same number of 20+ yard receptions in 2024 as he did in the two seasons prior.

For Sauce to claim his place as the best cornerback in the NFL, he needs to force takeaways. Even if he takes a step back in other areas, two or three interceptions per year and league-average tackling would elevate Sauce Gardner to the conversation of one of the best cornerbacks of all time.