How do these places grade the NT position? They don't tend to get hardly any sacks, tackles are also fairly low as well. They are mostly there to take up blockers to free up the other defenders and cause plays to move away from them.
If that's the assignment then they'll get graded on how many blockers they take on and if they force plays to move away from them. I think you sort of answered your own question.
...he might be good for first 3-4 games. Then come the usual problems. His body is done for. Its the NFL.
My main issue is that I think a lot of places, instead of actually watching the film, will only look at highlights and stats and grade players based off of that. He never said where the rankings came from. If it's PFF, that can be taken with a grain of salt.
Our Run Defense was not the same w/out Hankins. he and Mazi would have been awesome in this 2 gap defense with Zimmer.
Gotcha. The sites like PFF and similar ones will watch every play, it really comes back to how many of those do they truly understand the assignments and how in depth are they evaluating to grade accurately. In my mind a site like PFF is a great tool, but comes with some context to their grades as well. Their grading rewards stat and highlight plays more and punishes giving up the highlight plays more as well. For a position like DT the grades often look pretty neutral, but that's because as you already said they don't get a ton of those big impact plays that can swing the scoring one way or the other.
