Caused Pressure Rates 2024: Line vs. QBs

At the recent owners meeting, the NFL announced that they would introduce a new award for 2025 – the Protector of the Year award, handed out by a panel of offensive line greats to the best lineman of the year. It’s always great to see linemen getting more credit over the fantasy players (can I say that on FTN Fantasy? You won’t tell, right?). It’s a little odd that they’re signaling out individual linemen and not a line as a whole – the All-Pro team already exists, after all, if you want to find the best lineman at each slot – but the spirit’s right.

Though if there’s one thing that could stand to be changed, it’s the “Protector” part of the title. For too long, linemen have been judged by the number of sacks their team has given up. But sacks are, in a large part, a quarterback stat! And some linemen have been saddled with atrocious quarterbacks, both at avoiding sacks and avoiding pressure to begin with.

Last year, we introduced something called “Caused Pressure Rate” – the rate at which pass pressures could be blamed on the quarterback, rather than their offensive line. The consensus when evaluating overall numbers, at least in analytic circles, is that offensive lines are generally responsible for allowing pressure, and the quarterback is generally responsible for those pressures becoming sacks. This works as a broad-strokes assessment, but it isn’t always true. A team’s caused pressure rate is their pressure rate only when at least one offensive lineman is charted as being responsible – blown blocks and other similar mistakes. The higher a team’s caused pressure rate, the more frequently the line was blowing assignments.

With 2023 being the first year we produced those numbers, we didn’t have a lot to compare. We said we’d keep tracking things in future years to get a better idea on what the data is actually showing us, and here we are to run the numbers back for 2024.

Caused pressure rate is fairly consistent from year to year. There was a 0.48 correlation between 2024 and 2023’s numbers, and a 0.55 correlation between 2023 and 2022. This broadly makes sense – it’s rare that an offensive line gets significantly better or worse all in one go with five different positions in play. It seems safe to say that caused pressure rate is a fairly reliable way to evaluate how good a line is at pass protection in a vacuum.

Uncaused pressure rate, however, had a negative correlation between 2024 and 2023 – -0.17. That was enough to make us pause and see if there was something wrong with either the data or our methodology. A stat that varies that much can’t be useful, right?

A closer look at the data reassured us. The five biggest changes in uncaused pressure rate between 2023 and 2024 belonged to the Cardinals, Titans, Jets, Broncos and Patriots, all of whom saw a quarterback change last season. That makes sense! It’s primarily a quarterback stat, so if you change the quarterback, the stat should change. There shouldn’t be much of a correlation between how Aaron Rodgers and Zach Wilson run an offense! If you just limit it to teams which didn’t see a significant quarterback change or injury in 2024, the uncaused pressure rate correlation jumps up to 0.37. That’s less than the 0.51 you get between 2022 and 2023, but that’s reasonable, and there was a lot of quarterback turnover last year.

The league’s median pressure rate in 2024 was 31.3%. The median caused pressure rate was 20.9% and the median uncaused pressure rate was 9.4%. About two-thirds of all pressures can be attributed to the offensive line making a mistake, and most teams fall roughly within that ratio.

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But caused pressure rate ticked up slightly from 2023, while uncaused pressure rate dipped, and so while we had teams in 2023 that saw less than 60% of their pressures blamed on the line, no one dipped below the Saints’ 63% in 2024. And, perhaps to the surprise of no one, the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive line led the league at a pretty amazing 76%.

The following table lists total pressure rate, caused pressure rate and uncaused pressure rate in 2024. We also rank teams by what percentage of their overall pressures were caused by the offensive line.