Why the ‘Caleb Downs positional value’ argument may be a myth

Downs is undoubtedly the best safety prospect in this class, and he was the best safety in college football over the past three years. It’s quite possible he is a unicorn defender […] and believing Downs truly is a unicorn — a generational talent at his position — is about the only way that a general manager or head coach can justify pulling the trigger on him with a high draft pick.

Another aspect that got a little lost in the positional value discussion is the question of durability.

A few days before the 2016 NFL Draft, when the thought of the Cowboys drafting a running back with a top five pick was menacingly taking shape, my good friend rabblerousr explained the three circles that made up his first-round Venn diagram: blue-chip players, money-five position, and no non-durable positions. Today, that diagram would look something like this:

Unlike rabblerousr, who constructed his diagram under the imminent threat of the Ezekiel Elliott pick, I included safety as a non-durable position in my diagram.

But is the safety position really more injury-prone than other positions?

16 years ago, Brian Burke, then of AdvancedFootballAnalytics and now with ESPN, asked exactly the same question in a post titled “Are Safeties risky top picks?” Today, we’re going to walk in his footsteps and follow his methodology (but with updated data) to figure out if Burke’s answer at the time is still the same today.

To find out, we’ll use the data from the 20 drafts between 2000 and 2019, and we’ll look at two statistics as proxies for durability: total games played and seasons as their team’s primary starter, both from ProFootballReference.com. And because we’re looking at PFR data, we’ll add Pro Bowls and weighted Approximate Value for good measure.

When I pulled the data, I ran into an issue that Burke also had with the data:

Unfortunately, PFR doesn’t distinguish defensive backs as either a safety or cornerback in its draft data [they only started in 2015]. I classified each by hand according to their initial position classification during their NFL career. Some cornerbacks eventually transition to safety later in their careers. Ronnie Lott, Rod Woodson, and Antrel Rolle are prime examples. In those cases, I classified them as cornerbacks because that was their intended position at the time of their draft.

I used the same approach and manually reclassified 84 first-round defensive backs drafted between 2000 and 2014 just the way Burke did.

That led me to the first comparison, the durability and overall value of first-round cornerbacks versus first-round safeties.

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At first glance, the results here mirror Burke’s findings from 2010:

It appears that 1st round safeties are at least as durable and valuable, if not more so, as their CB counterparts.

The number of games played is remarkably similar, the discrepancy in years as starters and average wAV is likely a result of some of the corners here playing as slot corners. Slot corners traditionally get less official starts than outside corners, which impacts both the years as starter and wAV numbers. And the cornerback number of Pro Bowls is probably a result of the Pro Bowl still ignoring slot corners: In 2025, NFL defenses played almost 60% of their defensive snaps in a nickel formation with five defensive backs. In most cases that fifth player was a cornerback. So you have three corners and two safeties on the field over half the time, but the Pro Bowl only has two slots for CBs and two slots for safeties, so there are more corners competing for a Pro Bowl slot than safeties.

Next, Burke looked at just the top 10 overall picks in each draft. I expanded that to top 12, because that was the Cowboys’ original draft slot this year.

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At first glance, safeties seem to play fewer games and have shorter careers, but maintain their advantage in wAV and Pro Bowls. But as Burke also notes in his analysis, this is where we run into sample size issues, “so these numbers should be taken with a heavy grain of salt.”

And there’s a further complicating factor inside the small sample size. Sean Taylor (RIP) was drafted by Washington with the fifth overall pick in 2004, but was murdered midway through his fourth NFL season, cutting short what was looking like a very promising career that had resulted in two Pro Bowls over four years.

If we exclude Taylor from the data above, avg. games played for safeties jumps to 119.7 and years as starter surpasses cornerbacks with 7.1.

That means our findings from the first table still hold, top 12 safeties are at least as durable and valuable, if not more so, as their CB counterparts.

Burke then went on the compare safeties to some other positions, both for all first-round picks and for just top 10 overall picks. We’ll do the same, and again adjust for the top 12 instead of top 10.

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Overall it looks like longevity of safeties is at the top end of the positions listed, especially when considering the *Sean-Taylor-effect.

The number of games played comes to a similar conclusion, there is no longevity issue with safeties:

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In the end, there is strong evidence showing that top safeties are not a bigger injury risk than top players at other positions.

The position value issue remains. But positional value is far from being a definitive measurement on value when it comes to position, even if it makes for interesting debates. In 2021, Pro Football Focus put together an intriguing study measuring positional value primarily focusing on the NFL draft.

They combined a handful of metrics, starting with their Wins Above Replacement (WAR) metric, and found that when looking at the top 32 players at each position sorted by 2020 WAR, safety landed third-highest on the list behind QB and CB. This of course runs counter to many of the strongly held beliefs in the NFL community.

But in a day and age where defenses feature increasingly more nickel, dime, and occasionally even dollar packages as opposed to the traditional two-safety looks of past eras, teams now call upon safeties to be more versatile.

“The game is changing where you should have a bunch of Swiss-Army knives at the position,” NFL Media/Jaguars analyst Bucky Brooks said.

The Cowboys will play a lot of nickel this year if the data aggregated by @fball_insights is anything to go by, and good safety play will be key to that.

The value of good safety play has definitely increased over the last few years; maybe their contract value just hasn’t caught up yet.