• D.J. Reed takes the top spot: Reed has been a model of consistency over the past five years, earning coverage grades between 71.4 and 80.4. In 2024, he’s elevated his game even further, forcing an incompletion on 36.4% of his targets while allowing just 0.29 yards per coverage snap and only three first downs all season.
• Christian Benford‘s remarkable season continues: The Bills corner was targeted just once in Week 5. He allowed a 3-yard catch and made a defensive stop. He has allowed an impressive 0.15 yards per coverage snap and a passer rating of just 20.1 when targeted.
• 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 6.
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