It was indeed a happy Thanksgiving in Dallas, as the Cowboys walloped the division rival Commanders 45-10. Seemingly every member of the team feasted on Thursday afternoon, but nobody ate more than second-year cornerback DaRon Bland, who was the talk of the NFL on Thanksgiving night. The reason is one simple number: 5.
In case you haven’t heard yet, Bland has been anything but what his surname implies in 2023, and he continued to build on an historic year in grand fashion when he returned an NFL-record fifth interception for a touchdown. There’s so much to unpack here about Bland’s incredible season—obviously the gluttony of pick-sixes has been wildly impressive, but the way he has taken charge of the outside cornerback position in Trevon Diggs’ absence has helped keep this Cowboys defense among the league’s very best in 2023.
Those pick-sixes, though. Wow.
To add some more context, Bland came into his sophomore season without having returned any interceptions for a touchdown in his NFL or college career. The last time he took an interception to the house was in October 2016, when he ran a pick back 100 yards in addition to catching a 70-yard touchdown pass and having a 97-yard kickoff return. Yeah, it was really impressive.
The lack of pick-sixes was not meant to be a knock—these plays are rare in any level of football. In the modern NFL, about one in every 575 dropbacks results in a pick-six. In 2023, excluding Bland’s touchdowns, it is happening about once every 530 plays. But with Bland included, the rate of dropbacks that turn into interception touchdowns is about one in every 445 plays. A little more context into how special of a season we’re witnessing: in the history of the NFL, exactly 31 players have returned more interceptions for touchdowns in their career than Bland has had through 11 games this season. Among active NFL players, only 10-year-pro Marcus Peters has more in his career than Bland, with seven.
All right, enough fawning over the extremely fun and rare and difficult-to-repeat interception plays. It’s time to talk about why Bland has been so successful.
Evaluating cornerbacks by the numbers is tricky. No single stat satisfies everything, especially when you consider that the most successful coverage rep is one that most likely results in the quarterback throwing in another direction, leaving the cornerback out of that play on the stat sheet. But we can dig into a few areas that tell a story of a phenomenal season. For starters, Bland leads the NFL in coverage grades from Pro Football Focus. No qualifiers, no positional filters, no minimum snaps—he’s simply the best by that measure. But it isn’t just the ball-hawking ability that got him there; it’s the whole package.
No cornerback with at least half as many snaps as Bland has held opposing quarterbacks to a lower passer rating. That stat is becoming more outdated in the analytics community, and that’s partly due to the fact that it ignores sacks, which we don’t really care about when talking about a corner’s coverage ability. Bland ranks among the top 10 in the league in each of the four components that do go into passer rating:
- Comp. percentage allowed: 52.5 (6th)
- Yards/attempt allowed: 6.0 (4th)
- TD percentage allowed: 1.7 (9th)
- Int. percentage: 11.9 (1st)
The other part of the chart above that doesn’t result in highlight-reel plays is the ability to limit yards after the catch. Preventing receivers from making catches is great, but even the best defensive backs will allow a completion on at least half of their targeted plays. It’s just as important that cornerbacks are able to make a tackle quickly, and using yards after catch is one way to address that. When Bland allows a catch, he limits the receiver to about 3.3 yards after catch on average, which is the 10th-best mark among corners with 300-plus coverage snaps. His tackling grades and missed tackle rate (as charted by PFF) are a bit more modest, but both still rank in the 75th percentile of cornerbacks in 2023. And in Thursday’s record-setting game, he also quietly led the Cowboys with seven solo and 10 total tackles.
Bland’s rise has been a boon to Dan Quinn’s defense in the absence of the injured Diggs. When Diggs returns next season, Dallas will have two corners who could be the number one guy on many teams. With Diggs still recovering from a torn ACL and Bland shining so brightly, one begins to wonder: which of these guys will be the number one corner on the roster? Diggs was off to a hot start in 2023, with quarterbacks going 2-of-8 for 26 yards and one interception through two weeks, but perhaps the more fair comparison would be between their first two seasons. This gives us the advantage of having a 28-game sample size for both players, which also happens to include a breakout sophomore campaign for each player.
Breaking down the various components of cornerback play, it doesn’t paint a clearer picture of which corner is better so much as it paints a picture of how different these two players play the position.
In Diggs’ first two seasons, he had a pass break-up nearly twice as often as Bland has, and limited quarterbacks to a paltry 57.6 percent completion rate. He also racked up 14 interceptions in his first 28 games, close to the interception rate of Bland’s first 28 games.
Meanwhile, Bland has spent significantly more time in the slot, which is notable because of the matchups and routes they’ve had to face. Bland has allowed more catches and had fewer pass breakups, but the catches he has allowed have been far less impactful than the ones allowed by Diggs. The knock on Diggs’ 11-interception 2021 season was that on plays when he failed to get a hand on the ball, the receiver tended to gain a significant amount of yardage. Bland looks something the opposite through 28 games. Opponents may complete a few more passes, but they’re not going over his head and he’s rallying to make the tackle pretty quickly. Pro Football Focus clearly prefers Bland’s style of play, as evidenced by the wide margin between the two coverage grades, but that doesn’t mean Diggs’ style is less effective than Bland’s; it’s just different.
Dallas appears to have struck gold in the fifth round of the 2022 NFL draft with Bland. He’s cementing the starting corner position in the absence of the guy who was supposed to cement it for the foreseeable future. His interception record is something to marvel at, even knowing that regression comes for us all and he’s not going to house 70 percent of his interceptions for the rest of his career. The good news is that his underlying numbers still show the Cowboys have a phenomenal young cornerback, and the better news is that he’ll be paired next year with another phenomenal young cornerback, most likely setting up the best DB duo in Dallas since Terence Newman roamed around on the back end with a revolving door of number two corners, if not longer.
In the meantime, we can settle for watching to see if Bland can extend his own pick-six record in the final six weeks of the season.
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