It is a battle between him and Allen for most disappointing season.
Unfortunately, Paynes contract year is appearing to be the outlier.
He is playing much like his years before.
He MAYBE flashes twice a game, never gets any kind of consistent push, and doesn’t finish that well when he does get there.
And ultimately, him and Allen are a big part of this defenses failures.
You can’t pay All Pro money to those two guys and not even get average starter play.
He’s the 4th highest paid DT.
Can you honestly say he’s playing at that level.
I don’t care about his sack number.
7 of the 10 teams we have played have had more disruptive Defensive tackle play.
Thats eyeball casual test.
Then you look at the metrics and deeper stats and he isn’t in the top 10 in anything.
I’m not judging our DTs against how DTs have looked against us, because our OLine + Howell has been one of the worst at sacks/pressures in history. I agree he hasn’t jumped out as much as last year, but again I don’t know enough time to really break down his play. All I can say is when a big play is being made, his name is usually in it, and I have noticed him being doubled a lot.
Relative to other top DT’s his double rate is low.
And the top, top ones still win at a high rate.
Through week 9 he was not in the top 20 in win rate…
And all the guys in the top 20 had a double rate of at least 50%