We spend a lot of time focusing on pass offenses, but not necessarily as much looking at the other side of the ball. After running my Rearview ANY/A numbers, it struck me just how bad Washington’s pass defense was last year. And if it feels like that team has struggled against the pass for awhile, well, that’s because it has. Over the last five years, there’s been no worse pass defense in the NFL.

As regular readers know, ANY/A stands for Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt, which is Yards per Attempt with a 45-yard penalty for interceptions, a 20-yard bonus for passing touchdowns, and includes sack data. Relative ANY/A simply subtracts the league average ANY/A from each team’s individual ANY/A. Last year, Washington’s pass defense allowed 7.88 ANY/A while the league average was 6.14; as a result, the team’s pass defense had a RANY/A of -1.7. In fact, the team’s defense has had a negative RANY/A in each of the last five years.

The picture below shows each team’s pass defense’s RANY/A since 2002. I’ve color-coded the picture, with blue for good pass defenses and red for bad ones. If you click on the image below, you can see a magnified version.

Some thoughts:

Over the last four years, the Seahawks and 49ers are covered in blue. Meanwhile, Washington, Oakland, Tampa Bay, Philadelphia, and Jacksonville have a lot of red.

It’s been somewhat haphazard, but Buffalo has four strong years of at least 1.3 RANY/A: ’04, ’09, ’13, and ’14. The Steelers had a nice run from 2004 to 2012, while Baltimore’s run begins even earlier. Chicago is another historically strong defense that has really fallen on rough times of late, while the Chiefs and Texans are trending in the other direction.

A few single seasons stand out: the ’13 Seahawks, the ’09 Jets (and ’09 Bills), ’08 Steelers, and ’02 Bucs. On the other hand… those ’08 Lions are as bad as you remember.

Next, let’s take a cumulative look. The picture below shows defensive RANY/A from 2014 back through Year X. For example, since 2010, Washington’s cumulative RANY/A has been an ugly -4.2 over that 5-year period:

The Seahawks are at +6.1 over the last four years, far ahead of the rest of the NFL. But over the last 13 years, it’s still the Ravens and Steelers that stand out (in a good way, while the Lions and Raiders stand out in a bad way).

Finally, here’s the same information as in the picture above, but using the cumulative ranks instead of RANY/A.

So we can say that the worst pass have been: over the last 1-2 years, Washington; over the last 3-4 years, Oakland; over the last five years, Washington; over the last 6-8 years, Jacksonville; over the last 9-10 years, Detroit; over the last 11-12 years, Oakland; and over the last 13 years, Detroit.

On the positive side, Buffalo had the top pass defense last year, but the Seahawks have the top pass defense over the last 2-6 years; over the last 7 years, Baltimore; over the last 8 years, Pittsburgh, over the last 9, Baltimore; over the last 10-11 years, Pittsburgh; and over the last 12-13 years, Baltimore. Buffalo has really had some strong pass defenses over the last 13 years, but has zero playoff appearances. That’s pretty remarkable, as just about all of the other top pass defenses have been consistent playoff teams. New England is kind of an interesting one, in that the Patriots don’t really stand out in any way here.

Anyway, hopefully you find these as fun to look at as I do. Please leave your thoughts in the comments!