Not exactly breaking news here, but the SportRadar data confirms that the Birds now have the worst third down defense in the NFL:

Opponents are converting on 48.1% of third down attempts. Seattle is 3rd-worst at 45.8%, so there may not be much punting on Monday night in the Pacific Northwest.

Sean Desai was asked about the slop and said this at his midweek press conference:

“We have not been able to get off the field when we need to get off the field. Yeah, in third down and situational football we got to be better, third down, red zone. Those have been our bugaboos. Not going to lie to you. That’s been our Achilles’ heel right now. I feel really good about where we’re going with it, feel really good about our planning process towards it, and our players’ mentality in approaching that situation, being able to put guys in spots to go win those.

Again, we won a lot of third downs early in the year. We just haven’t been able to do that this year. That’s hurting us as defense. Increases our play counts. But it hurts us as a team. Our job as a defense is to get the ball back to the offense as fast as we can, and we haven’t been able to do that effectively enough.”

It’s true what he says about being better on third down earlier in the year. When I go backward through the data, the per-week fluctuations look like this, in reverse order:

48.1% —-> 47.3% —-> 45.5% —-> 43.2% —-> 42.6% —-> (bye week, no change) —-> 43% —-> 40.9% —-> 41.6% —-> 45.5% —-> 46.2% —-> 45.7% —-> 44% —-> 33.3%


There are some fluctuations in there, but after getting into the mid-40s, they pulled it back down to 40.9% and were middle of the pack in opponent third down conversion rate. Then it obviously went up again when they hit that difficult stretch of KC, Buffalo, San Fran, and Dallas.

But it should never be this high. It shouldn’t be tops in the league. Last year, they finished  38.6% in this area, which was 14th-best, so again, middle of the pack and manageable. When they won it all in 2017, Jim Schwartz’s unit was third-best, with a 32.2% number.