Once touted as the next shutdown corner, Xavier Rhodes’ production fell off dramatically the past two seasons.
He became known as one of the worst cover cornerbacks in the league in 2019, prompting the Vikings to release him last week. The Jets, however, are desperate and can use all the help they can get at cornerback. That makes Rhodes the ultimate high-risk, high-reward signing for them.
While Rhodes may have made the Pro Bowl this past season, his numbers didn’t exactly look impressive. He didn’t grab a single interception but managed to record a career-high 63 combined tackles – likely because he allowed a whopping 75.6 percent catch rate and an 84.3 percent completion rate when targeted, according to Player Profiler. Rhodes also allowed a 132.7 passer rating, was burned on 3.5 percent of his targets and gave up 12 yards per receptions.
Yikes.
But if you rewind the clock back to 2016 and 2017, you’d see a different Rhodes, one who combined for seven interceptions over those two seasons and averaged 54 tackles with 10 passes defended per season. He looked like the next Darrelle Revis at times and signed a massive contract with the Vikings the summer before the 2017 season.
Something changed between 2017 and 2018, though, and Rhodes has looked worse ever since. Part of the problem could be attributed to his age – he’ll turn 30 in June – but he’s also shown an inability to perform in the Vikings’ new defensive coverage schemes.
Touted as a physical corner who excelled at punishing receivers at the line of scrimmage, Rhodes appeared poorly positioned in the Vikings’ zone-heavy defense in 2019. Minnesota employed a zone defense on almost 70 percent of its defensive snaps and specifically a Cover-2 zone on 21.3 percent of snaps. Some ascribed his abysmal performance to that defense, but Rhodes also looked bad in man coverage. He ranked at the bottom of FiveThirtyEight.com’s Opponent Receptions Plus/Minus for man coverage with -10.52 – meaning he’s rarely expected to force an incompletion and he actually allows more than any other cornerback. That checks out considering his catch rate and competition rate stated earlier.
None of this bodes well for how he’d fit into Gregg Williams’ defense. The Jets defensive coordinator used a lot of man coverage but leaned on zone coverage when his cornerbacks underperformed last season. It’s a big reason why Trumaine Johnson didn’t last more than one season with Williams and why the Jets are searching for new cornerbacks to play with Bless Austin.
To make matters worse, Rhodes was also one of the most heavily penalized cornerbacks last season. He tied for fourth-most in the league with eight penalties – four of which were for pass interference. For reference, three of the seven penalties Darryl Roberts committed were pass interference. The Jets need fundamentally-sound cornerbacks who don’t ruin defensive drives with penalties, and Rhodes was exactly that in 2019.
It would be a tremendous risk for the Jets to bring in Rhodes after such a spectacularly bad season given his obvious drop in ability, production and efficiency. But if Joe Douglas can look past the bad and see what Rhodes once was and can still be, he could be a great signing for the secondary-starved Jets. The Bills gave Josh Norman a one-year, $6 million prove-it deal after back-to-back horrid seasons in Washington and a similar deal for Rhodes would mitigate the risk.
Schematically, though, Rhodes isn’t an ideal fit for Williams and the Jets. New York would be better served looking elsewhere for cornerback help.