True Pressure Rate Short: Grading the the top 10 in pressures through the first four games of the season

Photo via the Associated Press

You’ve seen it. Graphs and stats across the Twitter timeline outlining which pass-rushers have the most pressures in the NFL. That’s a fine way of providing a starting point for people to in general define which rushers are most effective at impacting the quarterback, but the lack of context is glaring when you study the pressures on film. This is what led me to create the True Pressure Score (TPS) and Pressure Quality Ratio (PQR) this past off-season where I charted every pressure of the top 50 rushers from 2022 to separate low-quality (schematic wins, QB failures, etc) vs. high-quality (actual wins) pressures.

Here is a quick explainer on the TPS and PQR from the linked article above:

While I have not found the time to chart every pressure in-season (I am still charting every sack), I did study all 190 pressures from the current top 10 leaderboard per TruMedia through four games with the intent of getting an overview of which rushers are earning their pressures versus which are beneficiaries of fortunate circumstances.

Here is the top 10 in True Pressure Score (TPS)

*These are pressures minus sacks (since I chart those separately for the True Sack Rate)

Here is the top 10 in Pressure Quality Ratio (PQR)

No, this is not a typo, Myles Garrett is posting an absurd PQR of 16.0, meaning all but one of his pressures this season have been high-quality. That is hard to comprehend, but does fit the theme from last year’s data where Garrett’s PQR of 3.12 was also the best in the NFL, although not this disproportionate to his peers (second in PQR last year was Micah Parsons at 2.27).