There’s an interesting distinction in categories of football positions that better categorizes roles than offense and defense: protector vs. creator. It’s something that’s been discussed in the draft community for some time, and I’m not sure who I first ran across talking about it—Josh Norris at Rotoworld, Justis Mosqueda with Bleacher Report or Eric Stoner with Matt Waldman’s Rookie Scouting Portfolio.

Essentially, protectors prevent plays—offensive linemen, cornerbacks and sometimes safeties. Creators create plays—defensive linemen, wide receivers and so on. The distinction is useful in designing a player acquisition strategy (having one great protector and a few poor ones is akin to having one good link in a chain), but it’s also useful when discussing the pitfalls of various statistical measures.

It’s easy to measure sacks and offensive yards, but it’s difficult to measure sacks given up and yards given away. Creators are responsible for a good portion of the plays they make, while protectors have to work more in concert; that’s the essential criticism many players have for Pro Football Focus—if you don’t know the assignments, how can you grade?

That critical distinction may be why it’s tough to figure out whether or not we have essential statistical profiles to project players like offensive linemen, and now cornerbacks, to the next level. For what it’s worth, a system I cobbled together for offensive linemen has seen early positive returns; there’s an extremely strong relationship (for the math nerds: an r of .79 and r2 of .62) between that system and first-year offensive linemen grades in PFF.

The system said Willie Beavers was the worst offensive lineman to be drafted, and he was cut despite being a fourth-round pick. It argued that Jack Conklin was the best, and he had the highest PFF grade of the ones who were drafted. The three best statistical grades of the drafted OL earned the top four PFF grades, with the only “miss” being the highly-drafted Ronnie Stanley, who earned a mere “above-average” statistical grade and ended up with the third-best PFF grade.

That’s extremely suspect given that it has worked within a small sample, but it’s at least noteworthy enough to continue the experiment.

Check out the other Production Profiles:

We’ll try to do something similar with cornerbacks today, projecting statistics for a “protector” position, in part defined by the performance of those around them.

As a reminder, these scores aren’t meant to rank the draft-eligible cornerbacks; they’re meant to give us an adjustment to already existing scores, supplementing extant draft grades—not creating them independent of film analysis. These are supposed to check biases or acknowledge that technique preferences can be subjective instead of objective.

There are two essential statistics being used to grade cornerbacks here: ball hawk rate and adjusted yards per attempt given up. Ball hawk rate just measures what percentage of targets a CB finds himself getting a hand on the ball—either a pass breakup or interception. Adjusted yards per attempt given up measures how many yards, touchdowns, interceptions and first downs occur in the player’s responsibility, with weighting given to those final three categories.

Those two statistics will be adjusted for schedule, so that cornerbacks on teams playing against better passing offenses get a boost in their production statistics (and the opposite for weak schedules for cornerbacks). The strength of passing offenses will be determined using the rating system developed by Sports Reference, then adjusted for the number of attempts one has to face.

Targets and yards given up were determined using PFF’s coverage statistics, except in the case where CFB Film Room has coverage statistics available

We’ll also be weighting run defense production in a small way, giving credit to players with good scores in missed tackle rate, tackle market share and tackle-for-loss market share.

I’ve separated the top-150 cornerbacks (as determined by CBS’ ranks) into two groups: tall and not-so-tall. Not because it matters as much as teams seem to think so much as it’s now a shortcut to define a player’s eventual NFL role—as a boundary corner or slot corner. Players like Chris Harris Jr. and Jason Verrett have proven that CBs under six feet can play very well in the modern NFL on the outside, but teams are moving short corners to the slot more often.

As always, age plays a fairly significant role in the final production scores. A score of 100 is average, and every 15 points up or down represents one standard deviation of difference (or tier, essentially).

Those heights are the ones listed by CBS. I expect some to change as a result of the combine and pro days.

I’ll try to breeze through these quickly if at all possible. Kevin King from Washington, Fabian Moreau from UCLA (who might be closer to 5’10” honestly) and Cordrea Tankersley from Clemson all have significant age demerits.

From a performance perspective, Tankersley scored well in all areas, and particularly in the run game but didn’t score well enough in those performance metrics to overcome age expectations. King was below average after accounting for his competition at preventing yards and touchdowns, but was particularly poor at creating disruptions as a coverage defender. Moreau was fine getting his hands on the ball, but generally still allowed too many receptions against very weak competition and couldn’t hold his own as a run defender.

The only other underperformer was surprising to me—Sidney Jones, also from Washington. Jones had a minor ding in the run game and had a fantastic score in adjusted yards allowed, but didn’t get to the ball very often and had a weak schedule with which he accumulated the score. He did play well against Calvin Ridley of Alabama, so there might be something to say about his performance sans competitive problems.

Other than that, there’s a few average scores to get through: Teez Tabor from Florida, Marlon Humphrey from Alabama, Howard Wilson from Houston and Ahkello Witherspoon from Colorado. Tabor generates a small advantage through his age, but really shines with his ball hawk score. He loses that ground, however, in run defense, overall adjusted yards per target and average-at-best competition.

Wilson profiles as one of the better run defenders in the group and didn’t allow too many targets to be completed in his direction, but also didn’t break up many passes—essentially negating his AY/Target score. That, along with a weak passing slate, dropped him back down to average.

Witherspoon has the opposite profile of Wilson, with a stronger passing slate and a better age score, but slightly below average scores in run defense and as a ball-hawk.

Alabama’s Marlon Humphrey is the youngest of the group and dealt with the toughest passing schedule, and so gets additional credit for his below-average ball hawk rate and his (worst in the set) awful adjusted yards per target score. His run defense grades are also below average. His age and schedule scores really drive his final grade.

As for Quincy Wilson, who is the top cornerback for Bleacher Report’s Matt Miller, average scores for the Florida Gator aren’t the result of counterbalancing statistical measures; he’s average at everything. At the median age with average yards allowed per target, he interrupted the flight of the ball an average amount of times against an average schedule. He did have poor run defense scores, however, and that probably is why he’s not quite 100 but 97.5.

Rasul Douglas of West Virginia is knocking on the door to the next tier, though, and it’s a bit surprising as to how.

It might sound weird that Douglas has a below-average ball hawk rate—after all, he has more interceptions (eight) and more interceptions plus pass breakups (16) than anyone else in the set. He was also targeted 99 times this year, twice the average of the other cornerbacks and nearly three times as much as top CBs like Marshon Lattimore. Disrupting a pass on 16.2 percent of targets is less impressive than disrupting one on 30.6 percent of targets, which Lattimore did.

Outside of that though, he benefits from having played a series of tough passing offenses and generates even more latitude because of his age.

After that are excellent scores by the aforementioned Marshon Lattimore as well as his teammate at Ohio State, Gareon Conley. Theoretically, good performance by one should put pressure on the other—if Lattimore consistently covered the top receiver in order to help Conley, he’d see the brunt of targets regardless of ability because teams tend to trust their top receiver over the other team’s top corner. If not, Lattimore’s excellent performances would shift targets to Conley.

Either way, both performed very well under those circumstances. Both had well-above-average ball hawk rates, though it should be mentioned that Lattimore’s was the single-best among all the cornerbacks studied and Conley’s was merely “very good.”

Lattimore also had the single-best score in adjusted yards per target allowed and did so against a fairly above average passing schedule. Doing all of that while remaining as one of the youngest cornerbacks in the draft is beyond impressive. Lattimore for president.

One big note, however: Conley, by far, was the worst run defender of the group, so teams that rely on cornerbacks to do anything in the run game might want to stay away—he was worse in that category than anyone else was in any other category, by twice as much. If run defense wasn’t such a small part of the score (about eight percent), he’d fall pretty significantly as a result.

By contrast, Lattimore was much more active in the run defense category and had above-average scores in every single category, falling behind Conley only in age.

The only other player besides Lattimore to earn positive grades in every category was LSU’s Tre’Davious White. He, along with Rasul Douglas, caught my eye at the Senior Bowl (see my Senior Bowl recap here), so I was glad to see him scoring so well here. White is a marginally better than average run defender, based on the scores, and adds to that with a very good ball hawk score and a pretty good adjusted yards per target score. This all comes against the second-strongest schedule (which shouldn’t be too surprising, given that Alabama’s was the toughest) among his peers at an average age. White has a lot going for him, statistically.

Here are the “small” corners, although it should be noted that Quincy Wilson and Desmond King are listed at 200+ pounds, so who knows. King is also being considered for safety, but I won’t include him in the safety production profile piece because I haven’t figured out a way to project cornerback performance in college to safety production in the NFL.

The first thing that stands out is the glaring red warning sign coming from Damontae Kazee‘s 70.7 score. He didn’t play poorly, he’s just old. Also, average scores against the easiest schedule among the evaluated cornerbacks is not a good sign. Very good run defense scores, but pedestrian ability to get a hand on the ball or prevent completions means he might be a no-go.

That sticks out as particularly bad, but it should also be noted that Cameron Sutton has pretty poor scores as well. The Tennessee alum’s biggest problem is in run defense, and that’s a huge issue, but what hurt his score the most were his troublesome ball hawk rate and mediocre adjusted yards per target.

Iowa’s Desmond King is just inside red flag territory, and what he does well—run defense—should suit him well for a conversion to safety. He played a weak schedule and couldn’t disrupt passes headed his way, however, and those tanked him.

You’ll find Adoree’ Jackson between the average and the very good in this system. Jackson, a USC product, has the second-best run defense scores of the short cornerbacks and the fourth-best among all cornerbacks, and supplements that with an ability to disrupt passes. He didn’t prevent as many yards as his peers did, however, which is why he didn’t break the 115 threshold.

Chidobe Awuzie from Colorado is much like Rasul Douglas in the tall cornerbacks column. Both have tough schedules and outstanding run defense scores, and accomplish that at relatively young ages (Awuzie benefitting more from the age thing). Both have below-average ball hawk rates and even-more-below average yards per target given up.

Two corners seemingly destined to be slot corners, Jourdan Lewis from Michigan and Corn Elder from not-Nebraska (from Miami), have virtually identical positive scores. Lewis comes to it by way of youth and very good coverage scores against weak competition, while Elder has a phenomenal run defense score (against Lewis’ average run score) and so-so coverage grades against much better competition.

Lewis and Elder will likely both be very good slot additions, but Elder’s lower cost and better run defense might encourage teams to wait a while before pulling the trigger on a slot player. Then again, I thought Lewis was much better on film and pretty great at the Senior Bowl, while Elder didn’t particularly stand out to me.

As a reminder, these scores give us context to grades—they shouldn’t be used by themselves to rank players. Scouts rightly look for projection instead of pure ability, and projection involves breaking down traits to see what will and won’t work at the next level.

This gives us some context to how those traits are working at the FBS level; sometimes we can miss the forest for the trees. Generally speaking however, these are meant to move players up or down already created draft boards.

Hopefully, as athletic info from the combine rolls in, we can create even more substantial grades that will allow us to better fully project players to the next level.

Our next piece will be on safeties, which will be quite the mess to unravel.