NHL Best Bets for Tuesday (11/19)
Kenneth Le
The league has staked its claim: to stop the Buffalo Bills, you’ve gotta play man.
At least, that’s how defenses have been lining up against them for years now, according to a stat that briefly went viral on Thursday. Per TruMedia, the Bills have been in the top five in facing man coverage in every year since 2019, and this year is no different. Exact percentages of zone versus man will vary from charter to charter, as NFL defenses are complex and often have combination coverages in play, but by our numbers in the FTN StatsHub, Buffalo faces man coverage 56.2% of the time That’s the fourth-highest rate in the league, as opposing defenses dare Buffalo’s somewhat lackluster receiving corps to beat their secondary one-on-one.
At least, that’s the theory. If this strategy was effective, we’d expect to see Josh Allen and the Bills’ numbers be worse against man than against zone. Well, we can do that! With our in-season charting splits, we can take a look at how each qualified quarterback does in both splits, and see if we can’t pull out anything useful. Let’s take a look, shall we?
The following table lists each qualified quarterback’s DVOA and DYAR in both man and zone coverage, and is sorted by biggest gap between the two, with the quarterbacks better against man up top.
| Quarterbacks Man v. Zone, Weeks 1-11 2024 | |||||||
| Player | Team | Man% | Man DVOA |
Man DYAR |
Zone DVOA |
Zone DYAR |
Diff |
| Sam Darnold | MIN | 44.1% | 29.1% | 371 | -11.8% | -8 | 41.0% |
| Jalen Hurts | PHI | 58.3% | 11.4% | 263 | -28.9% | -125 | 40.3% |
| Jared Goff | DET | 42.6% | 38.5% | 435 | 11.1% | 229 | 27.4% |
| Andy Dalton | CAR | 53.2% | -21.6% | -67 | -32.3% | -95 | 10.7% |
| C.J. Stroud | HOU | 43.3% | -3.8% | 85 | -14.3% | -42 | 10.5% |
| Jacoby Brissett | NE | 59.7% | -25.0% | -92 | -35.0% | -103 | 10.0% |
| Bo Nix | DEN | 45.8% | 1.5% | 148 | -7.9% | 40 | 9.4% |
| Kirk Cousins | ATL | 42.9% | 17.5% | 319 | 11.2% | 286 | 6.3% |
| Daniel Jones | NYG | 49.5% | -13.4% | -28 | -17.4% | -68 | 4.0% |
| Trevor Lawrence | JAX | 41.4% | 4.6% | 129 | 3.8% | 161 | 0.8% |
| Anthony Richardson | IND | 46.0% | -18.3% | -35 | -18.7% | -42 | 0.4% |
| Patrick Mahomes | KC | 43.1% | 3.1% | 160 | 5.9% | 230 | -2.8% |
| Geno Smith | SEA | 40.6% | 0.6% | 131 | 4.3% | 233 | -3.7% |
| Tua Tagovailoa | MIA | 40.9% | 1.9% | 73 | 8.2% | 144 | -6.2% |
| Drake Maye | NE | 57.9% | -16.2% | -39 | -9.2% | 10 | -7.0% |
| Jordan Love | GB | 48.5% | 10.1% | 185 | 20.2% | 271 | -10.1% |
| Derek Carr | NO | 53.8% | 8.5% | 153 | 19.5% | 181 | -11.1% |
| Bryce Young | CAR | 61.4% | -38.7% | -188 | -27.3% | -60 | -11.4% |
| Aaron Rodgers | NYJ | 54.2% | -8.8% | 35 | 2.6% | 165 | -11.4% |
| Caleb Williams | CHI | 49.2% | -30.5% | -227 | -17.1% | -68 | -13.4% |
| Player | Team | Man% | Man DVOA |
Man DYAR |
Zone DVOA |
Zone DYAR |
Diff |
| Justin Fields | PIT | 43.1% | -11.7% | -3 | 3.7% | 85 | -15.4% |
| Kyler Murray | ARI | 44.1% | 15.0% | 240 | 32.4% | 451 | -17.3% |
| Gardner Minshew II | LV | 51.7% | -24.4% | -135 | -5.6% | 47 | -18.8% |
| Joe Flacco | IND | 43.5% | -17.7% | -36 | 3.0% | 85 | -20.7% |
| Justin Herbert | LAC | 45.3% | 3.4% | 128 | 25.6% | 346 | -22.3% |
| Lamar Jackson | BAL | 43.7% | 38.5% | 466 | 61.1% | 795 | -22.6% |
| Josh Allen | BUF | 56.1% | 6.3% | 226 | 29.4% | 387 | -23.2% |
| Joe Burrow | CIN | 54.2% | 4.0% | 255 | 33.6% | 584 | -29.6% |
| Baker Mayfield | TB | 49.2% | 5.0% | 211 | 34.8% | 502 | -29.8% |
| Jayden Daniels | WAS | 52.3% | 8.3% | 221 | 40.8% | 480 | -32.4% |
| Deshaun Watson | CLE | 50.7% | -61.4% | -415 | -28.8% | -113 | -32.6% |
| Brock Purdy | SF | 47.5% | -1.1% | 106 | 32.7% | 464 | -33.9% |
| Matthew Stafford | LAR | 41.4% | -11.1% | 1 | 24.7% | 515 | -35.8% |
| Dak Prescott | DAL | 53.0% | -17.9% | -70 | 21.3% | 295 | -39.2% |
| Will Levis | TEN | 41.7% | -71.7% | -325 | -1.4% | 67 | -70.3% |
That is certainly a big ol table full of numbers! If you’re a more visual person, we can also plot all these quarterbacks on a graph. You still might have trouble spotting the Bills, as they are in a cluster with a bunch of other teams up in the upper center of the graph, but this can help spot outliers faster.
So have Allen and Buffalo been worse against man coverage? Well … yes and no.
Allen has been worse against man than zone this year … but so has the league in general. At first, Allen falling from 29.4% to 6.3% DVOA seems like a humongous drop off, and maybe a chink in his MVP argument … but it turns that only drops from seventh in DVOA against man to 11th against zone. That’s not an insignificant amount, the ninth-highest drop-off, but look at the other names right around him. He’s sandwiched nicely between Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow, making it feel like it’s a fairly standard deduction for great quarterbacks against man. All three passers do drop more than average, but that’s mostly because they’re shredding zone more than anything else.
As for the Bills specifically, I’d note that they have been particularly adept at getting open against zone coverage. Against zone, 62.0% of Buffalo’s pass targets are charted as “open separation,” most in the league. An additional 13.3% are charted with a step of separation, second behind Dallas. We’re not talking blown coverages, as Buffalo has the second-lowest percentage of targets to wide-open receivers against zone. But Allen does an excellent job finding receivers who win their battle against zone coverage, slipping into slight gaps in the zone and getting open. The Bengals (10.1%) and Bills (13.3%) have the lowest rate of throws against zone into tight coverage, as Burrow and Allen are doing the best job in the league this season interpreting and breaking down opposing defensive schemes. It’s not like Allen does a bad job finding open receivers against man coverage, mind you, it’s just that the Bills have been specifically good at cracking zone coverage in recent years. An over-reliance on man coverage against then might just be the other team’s separation anxiety.
Looking at the full table, we can make some broad generalizations. One of the stereotypes for struggling against man coverage is accuracy issues. Throwing to someone against zone coverage generally doesn’t require squeezing the ball into a tight window. It’s more about reading coverage and identifying an open target rather than helping Your Guy beat Their Guy. If a quarterback is a little sloppy, then they will be unable to throw a guy open against tight coverage. There may be some truth to that. There is a minor correlation (0.28) between being accurate and being better against man coverage. The average gap for the 10 least-accurate qualified passers was -18.9% in favor of zone coverage, with only Bo Nix and Anthony Richardson (barely) doing better against man. The average gap for the 10 most-accurate qualified passers, meanwhile, was just -2.5%.
That less accurate cohort includes not only Allen, but also Brock Purdy and Dak Prescott, two of the three good passers more than a standard deviation out in terms of being better against zone (sorry, Will Levis, you don’t count). Whatever their skill sets are, neither has ever been accused of pinpoint precision. They’re better at extending plays and finding the open receiver or having a great sense of timing rather than throwing their guy open. Accuracy also both decreases and becomes less crucial as depth of target increases, and Purdy in particular has been reliant on the deep ball this season. Being better at man than zone just makes sense, then, for those types of quarterbacks.
But here’s the wrench in that theory – both Purdy and Prescott were better against man than zone in 2023. Some of that might be some simple regression, as both quarterbacks had better numbers last season, but I think Purdy’s case highlights the other stereotype about being better against man coverage. In 2024, 49ers receivers are charted as either being wide open or with open separation against man coverage just 31.1% of the time. In 2023, that was 37.8%. Deebo Samuel has fallen from 44.1% to 25.0%, while Brandon Aiyuk dropped from 20.0% to 9.5%. If receivers aren’t getting open, it’s harder to throw the ball to them!
That flips us to the most interesting names on the chart – the trio of Jared Goff, Sam Darnold and Jalen Hurts, the three outliers in terms of being better against man coverage. Darnold and Hurts fall all the way into negative DVOA when facing zone coverage, dropping over 40 percentage points from their man DVOA!
Darnold gets to play with Justin Jefferson, arguably the hardest receiver to cover in football today. He’s second this season in receiving DYAR against man coverage. Just beating him there is Amon-Ra St. Brown, who helps Goff tons – as does Jameson Williams, who at 17.6% has the highest wide-open target rate of any qualified receiver against man coverage this season. Hurts, meanwhile, gets A.J. Brown, who leads ESPN’s pass catching metrics this season and has their highest open score from 2021-2024.
It’s not just the highlights. There is a broad, general trend for quarterbacks at the top of this table to have better receiving corps than the teams down below. But it makes sense that the quarterbacks who have some of the most difficult players to cover in football would have outsized success against man coverage — why on Earth would you try to stop Jefferson, Brown or St. Brown one-on-one? It’s asking for trouble, and more often than not, our trio of outlier quarterbacks have made people pay this season.
There are no one-size fit all trends here, of course, just broad suggestions and inferences you can make from slicing the data. And we encourage you to boot up the FTN StatsHub yourself and see what you can prize free! What this honestly is best at is probably less explaining why a team is particularly good or bad against zone coverage, and just seeing if they are, and projecting that forward. When you see, for example, that the Eagles use man coverage more than anyone else in the league, you can see that that might bode well against Matthew Stafford, who has the third-largest drop-off between man and zone this season. Or, although they couldn’t quite pull off the win earlier this year, you could see that zone-heavy Minnesota matches up well against Detroit, possibly explaining part of why they only lost by two. Go digging around; you’ll be amazed at what you might find.
