BakoSaint

Bryan Bresee has 3 sacks. If you look only at that one stat, he is a promising player. But look deeper and there may be trouble.

Bressee leads all Saints DT's in snap count through Week 4 with 173 so its not a small sample size thing:

https://www.footballguys.com/stats/s...m=NO&year=2024

Bresee's 36.7 PFF score is the second lowest on the Saints team, behind only Bub Means, who only has 18 snaps on the year.

https://www.pff.com/nfl/players/bryan-bresee/122142

But how could Bresee have such a low score with 3 sacks. PFF must be made up. He would have to be doing nothing else, just taking every other play off, to have such a low score.

While Bresee has 3 sacks, he only has 3 tackles for a loss, and 4 total tackles on the season. That means in 4 games he has only 1 tackle that is not a sack. He is doing nothing other than those 3 sacks.

https://www.pro-football-reference.c...s/nor/2024.htm

Looking at our team defensive stats Granderson has 15 tackles, Young has 11, Shepherd has 11, even Foskey has 7 (on 14 total snaps) which is perhaps why Foskey is not as low rated as you would think for 0 sacks.

Isiah Foskey produced 7 non-sack tackles in 14 snaps this year. Bryan Bresee produced 1 non-sack tackle in 173 snaps. Isiah Foskey has been 85.5x more effective in non-sack dline production than Bressee. We literally might improve our run defense greatly by moving Foskey to DT and benching Bresee.

I don't study tape or subscribe to advanced stats, but it sure looks like Bressee is a pure 1 category player this year. Last season he had 539 snaps, similar to Shepherd and Saunders (they were all 523-594) but he only had 19.5 non-sack tackles in 17 games, basically 1 play per game outside of rushing the QB. Shepherd and Saunders both had about 3x the production with non-sack tackles. Roach in half the snaps had double the non-sack tackles of Bresee.

On his career Bressee has 7.5 sacks and 10 tackles for a loss, so it appears that in 712 career snaps, Bryan Bresee has tackled a RB for a loss 2.5 times, which for all we know were on a runs to line up the ball for a field goal or kill the clock or something. You would assume he got a couple of those so basically zero effective run defense in 712 snaps for Bressee.

Bresee did have another dimension to his game last year, with 6 passes defended, probably batting down balls, but this year he has none. He may be regressing in his other skills and overwhelmed by being asked to play non-passing downs.

Many pass rushers make an impact with QB hits. Granderson has 11.5 sacks but 24 total QB hits the past 2 years. Bressee had 9 QB hits to 4.5 sacks last year. But this year he is 3 and 3, no extra QB hits in non sack situations. Young has only half a sack this year, but 7 QB hits.

Bressee had a limited game last year but got some sacks, some extra QB hits, and batted down some balls. This year he is playing more, leading our DT in snaps, and had seemingly done nothing but the 3 sacks, 1 strip, and 1 other tackle. Against the run, we have 10 men on the field when he is in.

Trey Hendrickson might have had similar issues against the run with the Saints, but he played DE so I think that may be different. I am not sure we can afford an extreme liability against the run right in the middle of our defense. I am also not sure Bressee has the value of Hendrickson as a pass rusher. I feel like Hendrickson got to the QB quick and forced bad decisions, whereas Bressee picks up sacks later in plays, when nobody is open, the pocket is breaking down, and Bressee is the pass rusher with the longer reach who gets a last minute spin move when the QB thought it was safe to get close because he wasnt pushing the olineman around.

In contrast to Bressee, Carl Granderson was 3rd on the Saints team in tackles last season with 78 and is on pace for 64 this year. That is how Granderson is an 88 in PFF and Bressee is a 36 despite the same number of sacks. Carl Granderson may be a $30 million a year player down the road. Bressee may be a situational pass rusher barely worth more than a few million.

Nobody is talking about it so I just wanted to do some research on why Bressee's PFF score is so low. It appears he is a liability in the running game more than Penning is a liability in the passing game. Maybe he will develop down the road but so far this year he seems to have become a more one dimensional sack chaser as his playing time has increased on non-passing downs. For the moment the Saints might do better if they gave snaps to any other dlineman at DT on passing downs.