Exploring the Kansas City Chiefs lack of investment at cornerback

How do the Chiefs compare?

Now that we’ve established that the Chiefs have invested less at cornerback than any other position on the roster, let’s take a minute to see just how far behind that puts them than teams that are considered the best in the NFL when it comes to defensive coverage.

With the ever growing salary cap, I didn’t want to reach back too far, so I just looked at the past three seasons. A special thanks to Sam Hays (give him a follow on Twitter if you haven’t already) for pointing me towards Pro Football Focus‘s team coverage grades.

I didn’t stop there though. I cross referenced the PFF team coverage leaders with the leaders in quarterback rating allowed, completion percentage allowed, average yards per attempt, and passing yards per game. Using all those criteria I narrowed my list down to 5-6 teams per season (2017-2019) that were great in coverage those seasons. I think we can all agree that if a team is good in all those areas (I sometimes allowed one outlier if it wasn’t too low), they were a great coverage team. Now, I understand that a teams’ coverage success involves more than just their cornerbacks, but I still think it’s valuable to look at what the best coverage teams have invested in their cornerbacks.

Here are the teams (by year) that met the criteria.

2017: Jacksonville Jaguars, Los Angeles Chargers, Seattle Seahawks, Baltimore Ravens, Minnesota Vikings

2018: Chicago Bears, New England Patriots, Tennessee Titans, Baltimore Ravens, Buffalo Bills, Minnesota Vikings

2019: San Francisco 49ers, New England Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens

After I found these teams I used Football Outsiders to find which cornerbacks on their roster played at least 30% of their defensive snaps during those seasons. Then I went through and looked up what round those corners were originally drafted in and what their cap hit was the year their team was one of the league’s best in coverage. Here are some of the interesting results.

100% of these teams had a corner that played at least 30% of their snaps that was originally drafted in the first three rounds of the draft.

Of the corners that played 30% or more of the snaps for the best coverage teams in the NFL, 37% of them (22 of 60) were drafted in the first round. I will note that if a team was in the top coverage teams for multiple seasons and had the same first round pick on their roster during those seasons, he was counted for each year they were on the list.

The average cap hit of the corners that played over 30% of the snaps for the best coverage teams was about $4.3 million.

If you count undrafted free agents as an “8th round” draft pick and average what round these corners were drafted in, the average round was 3.93.

There is no more drastic comparison to KC’s approach than the 2019 Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens had three former first round picks in former Chief Marcus Peters, veteran Jimmy Smith, and more recent first rounder Marlon Humphrey. When you combine those three with another former Chiefs, Brandon Carr, the Ravens’ four corners that played over 30% of their snaps combined for $33.5 million in cap dollars.

By comparison, if we assume the Chiefs stay healthy and things go according to plan, the three cornerbacks that are most likely to play at least 30% of their defensive snaps are Breeland, Ward, and Rashad Fenton. That would make the Chiefs average cap hit about $1.5 million and the average round originally drafted as the 6th. So the Chiefs are paying their corners about one third of what the good coverage teams are and their corners were also drafted significantly later.

We’ve now established that the Chiefs have invested in the cornerback position less than any other position on the roster and significantly less than the best coverage teams in the NFL over the past three seasons. So let’s see if we can come to some conclusions as to what this could mean for the Chiefs in 2020.