It is very hard to be a great safety from season to season in the NFL.
When we released our list of the league’s best safeties in 2021, we were pretty sure about the greatness of those players. Just five of the 11 players we listed last year made the cut this time around, and that’s with the move to a Top 13 in 2022, because the position has recently exploded in importance and excellence. We’ll eschew the spoilers for the repeat performers, but Anthony Harris, Harrison Smith, Jessie Bates III, Julian Blackmon, John Johnson III, and Darnell Savage aren’t in this list, and they were all in the mix last season.
In some cases, injuries were the reason — Julian Blackmon, for example. Other safeties simply didn’t perform up to their usual standards, and in most cases, we’re talking about fractions of regression — Jessie Bates, Darnell Savage, and Harrison Smith would certainly qualify there. Other safeties took time to find their way with new teams and new schemes — that would be the case for John Johnson III and Anthony Harris.
For the five repeat guys, and the eight new safeties on this list, there were new challenges. An increase in the importance of both two-safety looks and man/match coverage has made it a different game for a lot of players, as has the ever-expanding roles all defensive backs must play in the modern pro game. This has filtered to the collegiate game, as most of the players listed as safeties in the last few draft classes are less “free” and “strong” safeties, and more moveable chess pieces required to do all kinds of things.
Most of the guys on this year’s list are primarily coverage safeties. It’s great when you can blow up run fits and crossers from the slot, and if you can blitz from the edge, that’s fine, too. But in today’s NFL, where everything is about creating and preventing explosive plays, we wanted to focus on the safeties who do the latter thing best. Not to undermine those who ply their trades closer to the line at a more exclusive level, but when we’re talking about the most valuable safeties in the modern game, you’d best be able to erase deep.
So, with five repeat entrants, and eight new guys, here are Touchdown Wire’s top safeties for the 2022 NFL season. It’s the first of 14 different position lists written by myself and Mark Schofield, leading up to our list of the NFL’s top 101 players.