Four Downs: It’s early, but so far numbers add up for Steelers’ Devlin Hodges

1. Nip and Duck

In the equivalent of two NFL regular-season games, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Devlin Hodges has shown competency as an NFL quarterback.

Cut through all the traditional numbers and the subjective analysis, and arguably the most objective measures for evaluating player performance come from footballoutsiders.com. The formulas for its Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement (DYAR) and Defense-adjusted Value Over Average (DVOA) are all-encompassing metrics.

Football Outsiders describes DYAR as arriving at “the value of the quarterback’s performance compared to replacement level, adjusted for situation and opponent and then translated into yardage.” DVOA “represents value, per play, over an average quarterback in the same game situations.”

And Hodges has looked pretty good at both. So far. And he’s certainly scaled better than Mason Rudolph.

Since DVOA isn’t dependent on volume, let’s look at that first. At 18%, Hodges ranks 10th among 53 quarterbacks this season. Rudolph? He’s at minus-23.0%, ranking 32nd among the 33 QBs who have attempted at least 180 passes. For basis of comparison, Ben Roethlisberger had DVOA’s of 12.1%, 21.8% and 14.5% the previous three seasons.

DYAR is harder to quantify fairly because the more games played, the more DYAR can be accumulated. But Hodges’ 82 DYAR are more than 10 QBs who have started the majority of their team’s games this season — and certainly much more than the minus-210 that Rudolph has. Among 53 qualifying passers this season, only six have worse DYAR than Rudolph.

2. Doubling up

The Steelers are in danger to losing to a team twice in an 18-day span, something they haven’t endured in 21 years. It was during the 1998 season when the then-Tennessee Oilers beat the Steelers twice during the first 15 days of November — winning, 41-31, Nov. 1 at Three Rivers Stadium and 23-14 two weeks later in Nashville.

The only other time since then the Steelers played a team twice in three NFL weeks was 2012, when they split with the Baltimore Ravens 14 days apart in Weeks 10 and 12.

3. A lot to gain

With a pedestrian 4.66-second 40-yard dash time and middling preseason (1.9 yards per carry), expectations in some circles were tempered for Benny Snell.

But the rookie has performed both times he has been given the opportunity to be a featured running back in the NFL. Snell had 17 carries for 75 yards in an Oct. 13 win at the Los Angeles Chargers, and he had 21 carries for 98 yards in the win at Cincinnati last week.

It’s a smallish sample size, sure. But Pro Football Focus measures Snell’s yards after contact per attempt at 3.20 yards. That ranks 15th in the NFL among the 58 backs who have at least 46 carries this season.

By comparison, Jaylen Samuels ranks 54th in that category (2.17) and James Conner 42nd at 2.60. Another Steelers running back, Trey Edmunds is at 2.14. Even last season when Conner made the Pro Bowl, he averaged 2.87 yards after contact — less than Snell has so far this season.

4. Slow moving

Among all NFL teams, the Steelers have some of the slowest-paced games. According to footballoutsiders.com’s pace of play metric, only nine teams average more seconds run per play offensively than the Steelers (28.52). Their opponents ranked 19th in the same statistic at 27.88 seconds per play against the Steelers.

The data compiled omits situations that can skew the numbers, such as plays when the score differential is greater than 10 points in the first half, greater than eight points in the second half or overtime, and plays in the last five minutes of the first half. With the Steelers having been involved in so many close games, those qualifiers shouldn’t be affecting their numbers too much.

In the first half, Steelers games are being played with even less pace: 26th in the league with 29.14 seconds per play offensively and 21st with 28.18 seconds per play defensively.

Hey, Steelers Nation, get the latest news about the Pittsburgh Steelers here.