• Bills' Christian Benford starts the season on top: Benford finished the 2023 season as the 13th-best cornerback in the NFL, and he starts this season on top after an impressive Week 1 performance.
• Browns' Denzel Ward played well in a tough matchup: Sometimes, even the best get tested. QB Dak Prescott tried his luck against Ward seven times on Sunday and completed only two passes (28.6%).
• Unlock your edge with a PFF+ subscription: Get full access to all our in-season fantasy tools, including weekly rankings, WR/CB matchup charts, weekly projections, the Start-Sit Optimizer and more. Sign up now!
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
If quarterback is the most important position on the football field, then limiting the effectiveness of that player is the most important thing a defense can do.
A team can do this in two ways: It can pressure the passer to disrupt his timing, rhythm and accuracy, or it can shut down the opposing receivers.
Each week, after every NFL game is graded and reviewed, PFF will check in on the top cornerbacks of the 2024 season. These rankings will drastically change over the first month, as one interception, one missed tackle or one deep completion can dramatically alter a player's grade when the sample size is small. But as snap counts rise, the grades will stabilize, and we'll get a clearer picture of the league's best corners.
Last year, these rankings combined PFF coverage grades with our Successful Coverage Over Expected (SCOE) metric, which measures how well each coverage defender performed on non-targeted coverage snaps. We grade every coverage defender’s ability to prevent separation, whether they are targeted on the play or not.
These rankings will utilize that same data this year but with play-level normalization and expectation adjustments. Matching up with a WR is more difficult than covering running back, and playing man coverage is typically more difficult than matching in a zone.
Here are the top 32 cornerbacks for the 2024 season heading into Week 2.
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