Skip to main content
Packer Central

Amos Picked as Packers’ Most ‘Underappreciated’ Player

The seventh-year safety had a dominant second half of the season.
Bill Huber|
Amos Picked as Packers’ Most ‘Underappreciated’ Player
Amos Picked as Packers’ Most ‘Underappreciated’ Player

GREEN BAY, Wis. – In six NFL seasons, Green Bay Packers safety Adrian Amos hasn’t reached 100 tackles. He’s never broken up 10 passes. He’s never intercepted more than two passes.

Without headline-grabbing accolades, stats or sound bites, it’s easy to overlook the understated Amos.

NFL Network analytics expert Cynthia Frelund didn’t overlook Amos. In a story for NFL.com in which she pinpointed one underappreciated player on each team, she picked Amos. She made the choice based on her “total-contribution metric.”

“To sum it up without getting overly technical, contribution metric measures each player's production during the 2020 season,” Frelund explained. “The metric encompasses a value for every snap by each player and reveals each player's contribution to the team's overall win total. After making those calculations, I ranked each player's salary by position (contract data via the Over The Cap) to add some context around who was being ‘underappreciated.’”

Playing a defense-high 1,008 snaps, Amos was first with 83 tackles, second with two interceptions, third with nine passes defensed and fourth with five tackles for losses. Most of that production came during a superb second half of the season. He added another interception in the playoffs.

“In coverage, measuring his pursuit (how often his hips were facing the ball/speed to the ball), he ranked fourth-best in the NFL,” Frelund wrote. “Pro Football Focus agrees with that computer-vision intel, counting nine forced incompletions on 42 targets in coverage for a 21.4 percent rate, the fifth-highest mark in the NFL (min. 25 targets). This helped give him a lofty 91.5 PFF grade in coverage this past season. Add in his 90.1 grade in run defense from 2017, and Amos is one of just six defensive backs to post a 90-plus in PFF's grading in coverage and against the run” since the Chicago Bears drafted him in 2015.

PFF recently named Amos the ninth-best safety in the NFL. He’ll play a key role as the Packers adapt to new coordinator Joe Barry’s scheme. Green Bay went from ninth in points allowed in 2019 to 13th in 2020.

“There’s a lot of carryover between what we did last year and this year,” Amos said last month. “There may be some differences in how plays are called or certain concepts and things like that but, at the end of the day, football is football. When you’ve got the guys, I feel like we’ve got the guys no matter what we call out there.”

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Loading recommendations... Please wait while we load personalized content recommendations

Published
Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

Home/News