I liked this snippet from yesterday's Peter King MMQB article...
MMQB (cont.) - Peter King - SI.com Stat of the Week
I've got the perfect reason why the Philadelphia Eagles shouldn't even think about trading
Lito Sheppard. It's called the evolution of pro football. If you're a general manager, and you don't enter the season with three corners you can trust, you either have a pass-rush like the Giants or you're ignoring what's been going on in this game in the past five or 10 years.
The Eagles did a couple of smart things on draft day. Without a prospect they had to have in the first round, they dealt their pick for first-, second- and fourth-round picks. And they hung on to the dissatisfied Sheppard. His value to the Eagles, simply, was more than the value of a second-round pick, even though he's missed 14 games in the past three years due to injury. I applaud Philly for not dealing him, though to be truthful, a big reason why he wasn't dealt was because he wanted too much money in a renegotiated contract.
According to NFL playing-time documents, the average third corner in the league played 57 percent of his team's defensive snaps last year. Let's look at couple of teams with good secondaries to see how they divvied up cornerback playing time, and that will make my point for me:
Cornerbacks and Percent Of '07 Defensive Snaps San Diego
Quentin Jammer 80%
Drayton Florence 79%
Antonio Cromartie 72%
Denver
Dre' Bly 97%
Champ Bailey 90%
Dominique Foxworth 57%
Third corners most often played more than half of the time, including New England's
Randall Gay (53 percent),
Hank Poteat of the Jets (54 percent) and the Raiders'
Fabian Washington (53 percent).
I remember talking to San Diego GM
A.J. Smith the night of the draft. "We got our corner,'' he said happily, referring to first-round pick
Antoine Cason. You might wonder why Smith was so focused on getting his corner, with two good starters -- Jammer and Cromartie -- in house, even after losing Florence in free-agency to Jacksonville. "I'm a firm believer in this game today that you need three starting corners to win.'' Amen.
