Every once in awhile, I see forum chatter about how you can't assess DBs based on the current stats that are record or that certain DB stats are "too high". The favorite target of these posts is the % Catch Allowed stat, which I have always found meaningless, but more on that below.

The general consensus is that the % Catch Allowed by top CBs is way too high because it's now above 50% in 0.4.4 for most players. I find these arguments to be pretty silly, but I haven't taken the time to explain why. So here's why.

How does the % Catch Allowed stat work?

The % Catch Allowed stat on the player stats is a pretty easy concept right. All it does is take the total number of times a player made a catch when the defender was covering him over the total number times the ball was thrown at the offensive player...

...except what is not well known is what does covering mean in this case and what does it mean to throw at someone.

Pre-0.4.4, the denominator for this metric was WAY off to the point of meaninglessness. ANY pass thrown, including throwaway passes, had an intended target. So even if the QB was chucking the pass out of bounds, which was rare, it was counted in the denominator. This made % Catch Allowed percentages too low.

The other problem was that QBs threw A LOT of ill-advised or uncatchable passes. This led to an increased number of knockdowns (another stat that I'm not going to talk about because I think it is too low in the current game), but it also lowered the % Catch Allowed percentages without actually measuring anything meaningful about a defender's performance.

Now, in 0.4.4 and 0.4.5 (hopefully released soon), QBs throw the ball to receivers that have a relatively high chance of making a catch. This has of course the weird caveats like the instapass, so let's acknowledge it and move on. In general, what this means is that if your defender is doing his job, the QB is LESS LIKELY to throw the ball in his direction, which lowers the denominator on the % Catch Allowed stat and makes him look like a worse defender than he really is.

So how the eff do we measure player effectiveness?

If you want to really know how effective your CBs are in 0.4.4, there is a really simple equation that you can do to figure this out. Here's what you need:

1) AVG Number of Passes Thrown Against Your Team (found in Team Stats)
2) Number of Games
3) Passes Thrown at the Player (found in the Player Stats)

Then your equation becomes this:

Passes Thrown at Player / (AVG Passes Thrown * Number of Games) * 100 = % Thrown at Player

Let's take two examples from my teams.

Travis Baker - https://die-hard-fans.myfootballnow.com/player/3721
Jamar Brown - https://rivals.myfootballnow.com/player/3205

Baker has a 65% catch allowed percentage. Which according to some forum posters means that I should bench him, take away his meal card, or just straight up cut him. How dare he.

Not so fast. My team has had 454 passes thrown against it in 15 games in that league. Only 63 passes have gone Baker's way. Which means that opponent QBs have thrown at him less than 14% of the time.

In short, he's shutting down teams' number 1 WRs. And as a result, my team gives up 165 total passing yards a game.

Same story with Brown. 51.6% catch allowed Brown? That's terrible for a CB1...

...except only less than 12% of all of the passes thrown against me went at Brown. Now this percentage is helped out by the fact that Brown missed 3 games. But even if we go back and account for those games, which I'm not going to do, his thrown against percentage would probably be below 15% still.

Again shutting teams options down before a pass is thrown against him.

I haven't done a full analysis to get good benchmarks, but < 15% thrown at seems pretty good for a CB1 since they are usually covering the WR1 unless your opponent moves their WR1 around all game (like some owners, including me, do).

Long story short, you have to do some of your own work to find the DB stat that really matters in 0.4.4 and 0.4.5. But it can be found.