Ever since he became a New York Jet, one of my favorite time-killing hobbies has been to dive back into Sauce Gardner’s stats.
At just 24 years old, the Cincinnati product boasts the most mesmerizing statistics we’ve seen from an NFL cornerback since Darrelle Revis was patrolling the boundary for Rex Ryan. Like Kevin Durant watching Damian Lillard’s 55-point game, marvelling at Gardner’s analytical profile is a spiritual experience.
In a pass-happy modern NFL where high-percentage quick passes have become every team’s bread and butter, it should not be possible for Gardner to possess some of the coverage numbers that he does. One would think that every NFL cornerback is bound to give up at least a handful of chunk gains every single week, even the very best.
Gardner stomps on that notion.
During my most recent dive into Gardner’s numerical resume, it stood out to me how consistently Gardner steps up to the plate and delivers a lockdown coverage performance. When you peek at his “yards allowed” column, it is not uncommon to see a chain of single-digit numbers in succession.
To encapsulate this phenomenon, I thought it best to put all of Gardner’s career games into a bar chart, sorting them according to how many yards he allowed on throws into his coverage (per Pro Football Focus). Visualizing his career through this lens encapsulates just how astoundingly consistent he is at winning his assignments in coverage.
Gardner has played 48 games in the NFL. In a whopping 39 of those (81% of his games), he allowed under 35 yards, which is approximately the league-average bar for a starting cornerback.
In more than four of every five games, Gardner allowed fewer yards than the average NFL cornerback.
And he doesn’t merely squeak by the “league-average” bar. He usually soars past it.
Consider this: Gardner is more than twice as likely to allow single-digit yards as he is to allow more yards than the average cornerback. He has allowed under 10 yards in 20 career games, compared to just nine games where he allowed 35+ yards.
Gardner is strangely over-scrutinized for a player of this caliber. There are holes in his game to be picked, but the truth is, you will not find another cornerback who can match Gardner’s consistency in coverage. For comparison, Patrick Surtain has allowed under 35 yards in 44 of his 65 career games (66%), while Derek Stingley has done it in 22 of his 37 games (59%).
As Gardner and his camp proceed through contract negotiations with the Jets, expect them to bring up his remarkable consistency as a reason why he deserves to be the highest-paid cornerback in the NFL.