2025 Slot-Wide Stats for Defenses: Chargers Strength, Patriots Surprise Weakness
As training camps open, it’s time for us to continue our offseason statistical reviews! Don’t forget that you will find a lot of these stats in the new FTN Football Almanac 2026 . Get your copy today! Today, we’re finishing our look at slot versus wide splits by shifting things to the defensive side of the ball. We’ve already looked at wideouts , tight ends and running backs and quarterbacks , and now we’ll get to see who the best was at shutting them down. Defensive stats here are far less stable year-to-year than offensive stats. Matchups play a big part in determining these things; it’s a lot easier to cover a Jerry Jeudy type than it is to try to stop Puka Nacua . Cornerback stats also swing significantly from year-to-year. While better corners will have higher average coverage DVOA ratings than worse ones over the long term, even the best have years where the numbers don’t swing their way as performance is highly inconsistent from year to year. That means these numbers are a little less predictive for the 2026 season than some of the other splits are, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing interesting to pull out. We can see where teams were particularly strong or weak a year ago, and how they’ve worked to address those issues going forward. This year, the biggest gap between slot and wide performance belongs to your defending AFC Champion New England Patriots . A very solid eighth in the league covering slot receivers, that number fell to 30th on players split out wide last season, with a 25.0% DVOA that only topped the remedial units in Dallas and Tennessee . That’s a surprise, isn’t it? Christian Gonzalez , Carlton Davis III and Marcus Jones have a stellar reputation as a group; that was considered one of their strong points in the Super Bowl matchup against the Seahawks. It’s not Jones’ fault – he had only 33 targets out wide, and while they went quite poorly (70.4% coverage DVOA), he wasn’t there enough to move the needle. Nor is it really Gonzalez’s fault. While he only ranked 33rd in coverage DVOA because he ate a lot of targets for a No. 1 corner, he was first in success rate and fourth in yards per pass, and he comes out with a perfectly solid -6.9% DVOA specifically against wideouts. No, this is putting Davis on blast. His 21.1% coverage DVOA out wide was the 10th worst among players with at least 100 wide coverage snaps, the fifth worst among players with at least 300, and dead last among players with at least 400 snaps out wide. I’ll be honest, this surprised me as well – Davis isn’t someone I had mentally filed away as a liability or anything of that nature. Sure, he didn’t have any interceptions, but he also had career-low marks in yards per completion and yard per target allowed. But what he also had were 187 penalty yards, second most in the league, with a league-worst nine defensive pass interference calls against him, not to mention a smattering of holding flags. Some of that did come in the postseason, but he certainly wasn’t immune from that in the regular season, either. This was out of character for him. It was more penalty yardage than he was chalked up for in the previous three seasons combined. He’s always been an aggressive player, but that aggression too often led to penalty yards in 2025. He also did allow four touchdown receptions, which isn’t great when you’re not making any sort of big splashy plays. In fact, neither Davis nor Gonzalez had a single interception in wide coverage last year; the Patriots’ four interceptions there came from Jaylinn Hawkins or Robert Spillane . And then, of course, you have the thing that hit all Patriots advanced stats – the historically easy strength of schedule. The Patriots had the eighth-easiest defensive schedule since 1977 last year and that’s impacting the numbers here as well. Before adjusting for that, the Patriots splits out wide are bad, but not a disaster. Taking that into account, however, is what knocks them down to 30th. I suspect this gap won [... truncated ...]
