Rushing the passer is important! Here’s a rundown of a few stats that track the Packers’ ability to rush the passer.

Pressure Percentage

Pressure percentage charts how often a pass rusher is pressuring the quarterback. This stat is calculated by dividing the number of pressures a player creates by the number of pass rushes he attempts.

Generally speaking, a decent pass rusher creates pressures on a little more than 10% of his rushes, with elite pass rusher rating much higher. Here are the season-by-season results for each of the Packers’ active pass rushers utilizing data from Pro Football Focus. Keep in mind that these rates are very much affected by sample size. Justin Hollins’ pressure rate in 2019 was great, but he only rushed the passer 47 times.

True Pass Set Pressure Percentage

True Pass Set Pressure Percentage works the same way as pressure percentage, except it only accounts for what Pro Football Focus describes as “true pass sets.” These are a subset of passing plays that do not include screen passes, play action passes, or rollout plays, since all of those would affect a player’s ability to get to the quarterback outside of the player’s control. Consider a play where the quarterback rolls to his left. A player rushing from the quarterback’s right would have a more difficult time getting to the quarterback than he normally would and would thus have a harder time recording a hurry, hit, or sack.

Here’s how the Packers’ pass rushers are performing on true pass sets.

Production Ratio

Production Ratio is a single number stat that represents a player’s ability to make plays in their opponent’s backfield. By tracking a player’s performance as a ratio related to the number of games they play, we can see what players produce the most consistently over time.

Here are the season-by-season production ratio totals for every active Packers pass rusher. This data is current as of Week 14. We’ll update the Production Ratio standings after Week 18.

How is production ratio calculated?

We calculate Production Ratio by adding a player’s total number of sacks to his total number of tackles for loss, then dividing by the number of games played.

(SACKS + TFL)/GAMES PLAYED = PRODUCTION RATIO

Za’Darius Smith, for instance, had 13.5 sacks and 17 tackles for loss in 2019. He played in 16 games. His production ratio formula looked like this:

(13.5 + 17)/16 = 1.90625

For ease of use, we round to two decimal points.

What represents a good production ratio?

Obviously, the higher a player’s production ratio, the better. But generally, a production ratio over 1.0 represents a player who’s consistently performing at a high level. For the most part, defensive linemen will have a lower PR on average than edge rushers, with some exceptions. Tackles for loss wasn’t an official stat until 1999, but Reggie White still posted a career PR of .72, which would have been much higher if we had some idea what his TFL stats were like.

Below are the top 20 single-season PRs in Packers history.