Last season, including the playoffs, NFL defenses faced 18.676 pass targets overall, and 8,069 of those targets were addressed to slot defenders. When you have 43.2% of your total targets going to slot guys, that gives you a decent idea of how important those slot positions are — and, by necessity, how diverse the slot defender has become.
It’s not just about pressing an inside receiver and following him through a route. When you’re dealing with as many 3×1 receiver sets as modern defenses do, you’re going to be playing more complex nickel sets, and more dime than base. Now, you’ll have slot defenders carrying the inside receivers, not just the one who isn’t an X or a Z in an old-school three-receiver set. You might be pressing on one play, switching to a safety look on the next play, and working in conjunction with your teammates against advanced route concepts on the next.
In addition, you have to deal with the fact that slot receivers are no longer just the smaller, slower guys. Davante Adams is the NFL’s besr receiver, and he spent a full third of his 2021 snaps in the slot — 204 out of 618. And then, you still have to deal with slot monsters like Cooper Kupp, who lined up inside on 66% of his snaps — 545 out of 826.
To add to the fun, there’s the idea of having to cover one of the NFL’s more athletic tight ends. When you’ve got a 6-foot-6, 250-pound behemoth who can run a 4.5 40-yard dash and can nuke you on any route, that’s quite the challenge. Baltimore’s Mark Andrews, Miami’s Mike Gesicki, and Kansas City’s Travis Kelce led all NFL tight ends in slot snaps last season 1-2-3, and any one of those players can vaporize even the best slot defenders on a fairly regular basis.
If you can deal with all those issues, you still have to help in run defense, deal with slot targets who can block, and occasionally get to the quarterback in blitz concepts.
So, it’s a tough job. It’s even tougher to stay on top of your game as a slot defender. Only four players from last year’s list made this year’s list. That means there’s a whole lot of new top-tier talent to talk about, and here’s our list of the top 12 slot defenders for the 2022 NFL season — one list of 14 that Mark Schofield and myself will publish in the next few weeks leading up to our list of the NFL’s top 101 players.
(All advanced metrics courtesy of Sports Info Solutions, Pro Football Focus, and Football Outsiders unless otherwise indicated).
