Stat of the Week
Where Woodson lined up Plays Percent of his snaps
- Left slot corner 256 24.0%
- Left corner 254 23.8%
- Right slot corner 247 23.1%
- Strong safety (close to line, covering in-line TE) 198 18.5%
- Right corner 57 5.3%
- Free safety (off line, not covering one player) 56 5.2%
Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy said last week that Charles Woodson will be moved on some downs to safety this season. But in checking with Pro Football Focus -- actually, it wasn't difficult to check, seeing that PFF poobah Neil Hornsby is traveling with me on the trip, and started tapping away on his HP laptop, and he had my answer in three minutes -- Woodson's "switch'' is not really going to be unusual for him. "We want him to play closer to the ball,'' McCarthy said. But he's already, in effect, played some safety for the Packers.
According to Pro Football Focus, Green Bay had 1,182 defensive plays in 17 games (including the playoff loss). Woodson played 1,068 of those plays. The breakdown of where Woodson played at the snap of the ball on those 1,068 plays is in the chart above.
As you can see, the numbers say Woodson played safety last year, in the strict sense of the term, on 254 plays (198 at strong safety, 56 at free), a total of 23.8 percent of the defensive snaps. I'm not sure Woodson, at 35, is going to play an altogether different role this year than last.
Read more:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/peter_king/07/29/mmqb/index.html#ixzz2270M9RRc