Through six games this season, the Seattle Seahawks defense has locked up the top spot in a brand new, groundbreaking NFL metric: Defensive Impact on Passing (DIP). This isn’t just another stat, Emerald City, this is a revolutionary way to measure exactly how dominant our boys are on defense, and it shows the league is playing catch-up.
Finally, a Fair Fight for Defenses
We’ve all been there, right? Our Hawks defense is flying around Lumen Field, forcing throws, making plays, but then some stat pops up that feels off. Traditional metrics often fail to account for the sheer quality of the quarterbacks a defense has to face. That changes now. DIP measures how every NFL defense impacts quarterback performance *relative* to how those quarterbacks typically perform against the rest of their opponents. The entire idea behind DIP is to give a cleaner, more fair snapshot of a defense’s true effectiveness by adjusting for the collection of quarterbacks it has squared off against throughout the season.
DIP adds vital context to the traditional EPA per dropback by calculating the difference in each quarterback’s performance against a specific defense compared to his baseline against other defenses. Think about it: if an elite-level quarterback usually averages +0.348 EPA per dropback, and our defense holds him to +0.212, that’s a massive win! On the surface, +0.212 might look like a bad number, but with DIP, it’s viewed as a successful outing because it is significantly lower than what was expected from that quarterback. The opposite holds true too; if a defense allows a “low” EPA per dropback of +0.08 against a quarterback who usually performs in the negatives, that’s not as impressive. It is all about context, folks. Now that we are six full weeks into the NFL season, a solid baseline for each quarterback has been established, allowing us to accurately measure how defenses are truly performing relative to expectation.
The Seahawks Are Elite, No Question
The formula for DIP is straightforward: DIP = Total Actual EPA – Total Expected EPA / Total Qualifying DropBacks. Like all defensive EPA-based statistics, a lower, more negative number is better. The metric is also adjusted for garbage time, meaning only dropbacks when the win probability is between 10% and 90% are counted, ensuring accuracy. It accounts for scrambles and sacks as well. To keep things fair, a quarterback’s performance against the specific defense being analyzed is excluded from his baseline, and he needs at least 30 total dropbacks against other defenses this season to even have a baseline counted.
And this is where it gets absolutely wild, Seattle. Through Week 6, your Seattle Seahawks defense is not just at the top of the DIP rankings, they are absolutely blowing away the competition! With a DIP of **-0.325**, the Hawks are the undisputed best defense in the NFL according to this game-changing metric. To put that in perspective, the second-place Chicago Bears are way back at -0.249, and the New England Patriots are at -0.176. That is a significant gap, proving our defense is operating on a totally different level.
This is not a quirky stat, folks. This new metric, born from six weeks of intense NFL action, tells us our D is not just good, it is *elite*. It means our defense is making elite quarterbacks look human and making average quarterbacks look lost. When the Hawks take the field next, know that our defense is playing at a level few others in the league can even touch, by a measure designed specifically to be fair and accurate. Get ready to see our defense continue to prove they are the real deal, Emerald City!
This article was created with AI assistance and published under Seattle On Tap’s editorial standards. See our Editorial Policy.
Originally reported by Buffalo Rumblings.
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