Defensive Film Grades From Miami Dolphins' 20-3 Week 17 Victory Over Cleveland Browns

It might be time to have a talk about Kader Kohou.

Three points is always a good day at the office for an NFL defense. Sure, the Dolphins went against a skeleton crew from Cleveland with a young quarterback still searching for his first touchdown pass of the season after 115 pass attempts. But Miami’s unit still found strength in the red zone and forced two turnovers — the latter of which has not been easy all season. But who stood out the most?

I’ve graded the All-22 coaches’ film. And here’s what I’ve found.

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Methodology

I am implementing a portion of the grading process used by Pro Football Focus this year to quantify player performance.

“The PFF grading system evaluates every player on every play during a football game…did the quarterback make a great throw, but it was dropped? The quarterback contributed to positive production and will receive a positive grade for that effort, even though the receiver let him down, earning a negative grade.

Each player is given a grade of -2 to +2 in 0.5 increments on a given play, with 0 generally being the average or “expected” grade. There are a few exceptions, as each position group has different rules, but those are the basics. The zero grade is essential as most plays feature many players doing their job at a reasonable, or expected, level, so not every player on every play needs to earn a positive or a negative.”

— Pro Football Focus on their grading methodology

This is where my implementation of the PFF approach ends, however. Pro Football Focus converts this scoring into a number on a 0-100 scale while factoring in the weighted value of certain types of reps for certain positions. That isn’t what I intend to produce. I’m much less interested in an “adjusted” consumable score for a player than a true reflection of their net excellent and bad contributions relative to the reps they are assigned throughout a game.

I intend to grade each game for the Dolphins this season with this approach. This will allow us to see the full scope of spectacular and game-changing plays from players, ascertain who are models of consistency, and help further amplify poor player performances by the cumulative sum and per-play average in 2024.

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Defensive Grades Vs. Cleveland

The group of Kohou, Brooks, Sieler & Ramsey all scoring so close to their Week 16 grades is a great development for the Fins. These are some of your more prominent pieces — Kohou has made it three straight weeks of very good play. Calais Campbell was on a different planet with his scoring efforts and the race between him and Zach Sieler for highest graded defensive player is going to come down the very last reps this season.

Kendall Fuller’s replacement, Storm Duck, struggled at times. He and Jevon Holland on the back end were at the root of some of Cleveland’s biggest plays on the day. They, plus Da’Shawn Hand (thanks to a defensive holding penalty) and Benito Jones (who was very up & Down) were the only prominent pieces of the defense to go under expectation this week.

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All-22 Coaches Film Analysis