Defenses and Pressure 2024: Is Myles Garrett a One-Man Team?

Let’s continue our annual offseason data dive in the ramp up to the 2025 FTN Football Almanac. (Pre-sale available right here!) Last week, we took a look at pressure’s effect on quarterback stats. This week, we flip it to the other side of the ball and look at defensive performances tied to pressure.

2024’s defensive pressure numbers call to mind one of the great metaphysical thought experiments – if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? We can develop a variation on that question as we look at our big table – if a defense gets pressure, yet is shredded anyways, was anyone actually pressured? It’s a good thing we have the Cleveland Browns around to help us get to the bottom of these thought experiments.

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Most Pressure, Least Success: Browns

Cleveland only had one individual defender in the top 100 in pressures – Myles Garrett. But it turns out that Garrett plus whoever else you happen to scrape up equals a productive pass rush, so it’s probably a good thing that Cleveland handed him a massive four-year extension this offseason.

But, perhaps surprisingly, Cleveland led the league in pressure rate in 2024.  And not by a little, either – they managed pressure on a whopping 41.3% of pass plays last season.

That’s high – very, very high. It’s the highest we’ve seen since shifting to the charting here at FTN and high enough that I triple checked that we hadn’t mis-entered a number or otherwise had a problem in the data. But no, Cleveland routinely and regularly managed to get in the backfield and harass opposing quarterbacks. My initial hunch was that we’d see some sort of pre- and post-Za’Darius Smith split, as he was the best pass rusher other than Garrett that Cleveland had, but that’s not really the case, either. The Browns had a 41.7% pressure rate in Weeks 1-9, with Smith in town, and 41.0% afterwards. They had at least a 26.9% pressure rate in every game, so their worst day (against the Eagles) was better than the average for the worst six teams. Their Week 2 game against Jacksonville saw them getting pressure 60% of the time, the second-highest individual rate of the season, and they were one of the rare teams to have two separate games with at least a 50% pressure rate.

And even though Garrett was the only individual Brown to rack up huge quarterback pressure numbers, it’s not like no one else on the team was doing anything. Cleveland still had a 34.4% pressure rate on plays where Garrett did not get pressure, which would have ranked in the top eight by itself. Yes, a significant amount of those pressures came because offensive lines were shifting their protections specifically to stop Garrett, but the ability of a Smith or an Isaiah McGuire or a Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah to take advantage of that attention is a critical part of maximizing the effect of having a great pass rusher. It was a long season in Cleveland, but their pass rush was at least something they could hang their hat on.

But was it effective? Yes and no.

Getting pressure is just one part of the equation. Turning that pressure into positive plays is the name of the game, and Cleveland struggled there. Their -31.9% DVOA with pressure was the worst in the league. They had the lowest sack rate when getting pressure at 15.5% and forced the fewest checkdowns at 5.9%. They were tied with Kansas City giving up a league-worst 18 pass plays of at least 20 yards. Because the pressure couldn’t get home, Cleveland was getting picked apart on the back end – they allowed 7.2 yards per play when they got pressure but not a sack. Only the Commanders had a worse DVOA on non-sack pressures, but Cleveland had so much more than Washington that they finish comfortably in last place.

It’s not really fair to put all that blame on the pass rush, however. While it certainly would have helped if more of those pressures had become sacks, Cleveland’s pass defense was getting picked apart whether the Browns got pressure or not – it was a secondary problem, not a pass rush problem, that was killing Cleveland. It was a race to see whether pressure could get home before someone in the secondary blew a coverage, and that was about a 50/50 shot in 2024. Cleveland’s defensive DVOA improved by 79.4% when they got pressure, but that’s in the lower quartile of the league. They were a bad pass defense, whether they got pressure or not. It’s a little surprising that Cleveland didn’t draft any secondary help after Denzel Ward, Greg Newsome II and Martin Emerson Jr. all had down years in 2024. Bounceback seasons in the secondary should help make the pass rush more effective, though it would be nice of someone other than Garrett could wrap things up with a sack at some point.

The following table highlights pressure numbers for all team defenses, ranked from highest pressure rate (Cleveland Browns, 41.3%) to lowest pressure rate (Carolina Panthers, 22.7%). Stats come from FTN Data charting, with these numbers all available on the FTN StatsHub.