The San Francisco 49ers defense lost their star player, Nick Bosa, after a few games, and the pass rush never recovered. That unit fell off a cliff once Fred Warner dislocated his ankle.
That Tampa Bay Buccaneers game is a perfect example of the respect Warner commands. Baker Mayfield didn’t think about throwing the ball over the middle of the field when No. 54 was manning the middle. But as soon as Warner was gone, the game plan changed, the Red Sea parted, and seemingly every pass went right down
the middle.
ESPN released its linebacker positional rankings on Tuesday morning. Unsurprisingly, Warner was No. 1. The biggest shock was somebody watching the NFL last year and thinking that there are four players at the position better than Warner:
Highest ranking: 1 | Lowest ranking: 5
Age: 29 | Last year’s ranking: 1Rarely does a player miss most of a season due to injury and maintain his standing in our top 10. Warner, however, earned around 70% of the first-place votes. It was a slight drop from the previous year, but his status in the position hierarchy remains clear.
Warner has been an All-Pro four times since 2020, second only to edge rusher Myles Garrett (five) during that span. An ankle injury limited Warner to six games last season, but he made the most of those appearances with 51 tackles (two for loss), three pass deflections, two forced fumbles and a fumble recovery.
“He diagnoses faster than anyone,” an NFL coordinator said. “That’s really his secret sauce. Processes the game at an incredibly fast level.”
These rankings aren’t very consistent. For example, Ravens linebacker Roquan Smith received a first-place vote and another vote in which he was unranked. The deeper we get into these positions, the more it seems like whoever is filling out these ballots is just pressing buttons.
The stats with and without Warner were eye-opening. The defense allowed 7.9 yards per attempt on play-action passes with Warner on the field in 105 attempts, compared to just 5.5 yards per pass with Warner on the field. That 5.5 number was the lowest in the NFL.
Warner being back in the fold would explain why fans are overwhelmingly confident the defense will return to a top-12 unit.
When he’s on the field, they don’t yield big plays. The explosive play rate went from 10.2% to 19.3%, nearly doubling without Warner. He fixes a lot of problems. I noticed Malik Mustapha didn’t really trust the linebackers late in the season last year, so he was getting a little nosy and trying to do the job of the second-level defenders as well as his own.
It goes without saying, but it’ll go a long way to get a Hall of Famer who just so happens to be the best at his position back onto the field.
