No Pro Bowls? No Twitter followers? No problem.
The Carolina Panthers will enter the 2019 season with a number of roster holes to fill and finding a defensive end who can get to the quarterback will be among the most urgent. Julius Peppers is 38 and Father Time will catch up at some point. Wes Horton was largely invisible this year. Efe Obada is promising but raw.
Thankfully, the Panthers will still have Mario Addison, a player who over the last three seasons has established himself was one of the NFL’s most consistently effective sack artists. But despite his effective play, Addison remains one of the league’s most underrated and underappreciated players.
Addison’s sick stats
Mario’s 29.5 sacks between 2016 and 2018 ranks No. 10 in the NFL. This puts Addison above more nationally celebrated players like Joey Bosa (28.5), Geno Atkins (28.0), Jason Pierre-Paul (28.0), Cameron Wake (28.0), Everson Griffen (26.0), and Demarcus Lawrence (26.0). Each of these players have been Pro Bowlers at least once in their careers while Mario Addison has never earned that recognition.
One of the reasons why Addison tends to fly under the national radar is because he is almost boringly consistent. Over the last three years his season sack totals have been 9.5 in 2016, 11.0 in 2017, and 9.0 in 2018. While he’s never had the eye-popping 14 sack type of a season to generate national buzz, he’s been consistently solid year after year. Only seven players registered at least 9.0 sacks in each of the last three seasons: Mario Addison, Von Miller, Khalil Mack, Geno Atkins, Ryan Kerrigan, Chandler Jones, and Frank Clark.
Where’s the love?
Despite his consistently strong play over the last three years Addison still flies under the national radar. Remember, he’s an eight-year veteran who has played in seven playoff games between 2013 and 2017, including Super Bowl 50. He’s a teammate of Cam Newton and Luke Kuechly and plays for a franchise that normally appears in a couple of nationally televised games each year.
One way to evaluate the national attention a player gets is to simply look at the number of Twitter followers he has. When compared to the “9.0 sacks club” listed above, Addison’s 19,600 Twitter followers are dwarfed by his peers such as Von Miller (444k followers), Khalil Mack (228k), Chandler Jones (225k), Ryan Kerrigan (131k), Geno Atkins (100k), and even Frank Clark (48k).
Yes, Frank Clark has more than twice as many Twitter followers as Mario Addison.
Don’t be surprised if Mario reaches double digits in sacks in 2019. He will be entering the final season of his 3-year, $22.5 million deal and a dominant campaign will only help with free agency looming. Hopefully the defense around Super Mario will be improved next year (more pressure up front, better secondary behind), freeing him up to keep punishing opposing quarterbacks.
As Panthers fans we know we’ve got one of the NFL’s better pass rushers in Mario Addison.
Let’s hope a dominant 2019 helps the rest of the world figure it out as well.
from Cat Scratch Reader - All Posts http://bit.ly/2B4KZGD
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