On the latest episode of his Not Just Football podcast, Cameron Heyward supported his teammate T.J. Watt for Defensive Player of the Year while also taking a shot at Pro Football Focus. Heyward said that award voting doesn’t necessarily reflect the most deserving players.
“It’s all about what the media wants,” Heyward said about award voting during a discussion on whether Baker Mayfield should win Comeback Player of the Year. “If I really want to talk about media, you can talk about how T.J. Watt didn’t get enough AP votes and now we’re already crowning a new Defensive Player of the Year when, if you look at the stats alone, it’s a different story.”
Co-host Hayden Walsh brought up that all the arguments against Watt involve his pass-rush win rate and that regular stats “aren’t good enough,” which led Heyward to take a shot at the organization.
“PFF now has AP votes. I don’t know how that happens, but now we’re using things that don’t matter, because you can win in pass rush, and we’re taught this in practice, you can win in pass rush, but doesn’t mean you’re gonna get the sack. So what are you really saying when you say that?” Heyward argued.
After Walsh said they don’t want to have beef with PFF, Heyward replied “Why not? They got enough beef.”
Watt was a first-team AP All-Pro, but he received less votes than Cleveland Browns DE Myles Garrett, a sign that Garrett is likely to win Defensive Player of the Year as the AP votes for both awards. While there’s no publicly available information of the 50 voters who make up the AP voting to validate Heyward’s claim that PFF gets a vote, Watt was snubbed from the PFF All-Pro team and the NFLPA All-Pro team. The main argument against Watt’s candidacy despite the seventh-year veteran having more sacks and tackles for a loss than Garrett is his lower pass-rush win rate on PFF, a category that Garrett led in 2023.
Clearly, Heyward doesn’t think pass-rush win rate matters and that actually finishing the play and getting the sack should be the measure for comparing Watt and Garrett, or others in DPOY contention like Micah Parsons and Maxx Crosby. Heyward isn’t the first notable person to take a shot at PFF as Watt’s brother, J.J., came out pretty strongly against PFF on The Pat McAfee Show last week.
There’s become more of a focus on analytics as a player-evaluation tool, as there should be. But sometimes the analytics can be relied upon too much to measure the effectiveness of a player rather than stats that actually show up on the box score. Garrett had an impressive season, and he was able to get more hurries than Watt per PFF’s tracking metrics (57 for Garrett and 47 for Watt), but Watt had more sacks, tackles for a loss and the same number of forced fumbles as Garrett.
But it feels like a foregone conclusion that Garrett will win the award given how the All-Pro voting went, and if he does, it sure seems like the underlying metrics will be one of the main reasons cited. That’s something that clearly doesn’t sit right with Heyward, who feels like his teammate deserves the award.
It’s hard to disagree with Heyward, and while PFF is an important tool for player evaluation and its data and stats shouldn’t be disregarded, they also shouldn’t necessarily take precedence when Watt’s “regular” stats are so much better than Garrett’s and Parsons’ and really, anyone else in the Defensive Player of the Year discussion. In this case, the narrative that Garrett was a better player because of things like his pass-rush win rate seems to be the one that will win out when it comes to the Defensive Player of the Year race, and that doesn’t sit well with Heyward and others.
Watch the full episode of Not Just Football below.
