Instead of me introducing this week's Defensive Player of the Week, I thought I'd let him just go ahead and do it himself:



I think Fencik is being a little disingenuous when he says that he doesn't know what they mean by calling him "The Hit Man." During his 12-year career, he gained the reputation as being one of the most ferocious and hard-hitting safeties in football, and, after enduring the lean years of the late 70s and early 80s with the Bears, he was already in place to be the perfect free safety for Buddy Ryan's 46 defense. The free safety was even more the quarterback of the 46 than the middle linebacker was, and was required to possess very high levels of intelligence and aggression. Fencik had both in spades.

Since starting the TLL, I've had the feeling that Gary Fencik is one of the players largely underrated by history.. I say that fully aware that it's a very difficult statement to substantiate, since defensive players in general are so difficult to evaluate, especially ones you didn't see in person a lot. It's one thing if you're Pro Football Focus and have teams of researchers analyzing everything every player does on every play. But even if you can afford the $100 a year to have access to such data, it doesn't help figure out how a guy like Gary Fencik compares to, say, Earl Thomas, since there is almost no data for Fencik. We know

A number I rely on a lot when designing the defenses for the TLL rosters is Pro-Football-Reference's Approximate Value. It's far from perfect, but without it, it would be impossible to make TLL rosters for positions like defense and offensive line, where there is simply no statistical data for players back in the era we chose to set the league in. It's kind of the opposite of the way PFF evaluates players. It works by a series of assumptions, starting with the assuming that, for example, defenses that performed better (defined by points allowed per defensive drive) had better players and thus assigns more points to those teams. Then, within individual teams, it assumes that players who were named all-pros were better than players who were not, so it assumes the largest share of the team's defensive points to the all-pros. Similarly, players who were named to the Pro Bowl were better than those who were not (a far less dubious assumption in the 70s than it is now), and gives those Pro-Bowl players the next-largest share of the points. Then, it assumes that players who started were better than those who did not, so it assigns the third-most points to the starters. Anything left over is then assigned to the role players.

Each assumption is a valid one as a general rule, and while it's impossible to claim with any certainty that a particular player who had 12 AV for one season was better than another one who was assigned 10, it is a near-certainty that the group of all 12 AV players was better than that of 10 AV players. Similarly, it's valid to say that players who amassed 100 AV in their careers were better than those who accumulated 50.

So let's look at the list of the top-25 AV earners for players listed as safeties, post-merger (1970-present):

There's Fencik at #21. But do all the names belong on this list? For one thing, Seth Joyner is listed, and, as we all know, he was a linebacker (who, for some reason, PFR has listed as playing part-time as a strong safety in 1995 for Arizona), so he's out, and that moves Fencik up to #20. And then there is a pretty sizeable handful of guys who played the majority of their careers at cornerback and switched over to safety as their speed declined at the end. That was certainly the case for guys like Charles Woodson (#3), Ronde Barber (#4), Aeneas WIlliams (#7), Troy Vincent (#12), Albert Lewis (#16) and Roger Wehrli (#20), so excluding those guys moves Fencik up to 14th. Then there are a number of other players who started out as corners, but played a significant part of their careers at corner. Rod Woodson (#1, hallowed be his name) played 12 seasons as a cornerback, but then another five as a safety, and Ronnie Lott (#2) played only five seasons at corner before moving to the safety position he dominated for the next nine seasons. I'm making a subjective call here, but I'm calling Rod a cornerback and Lott a safety based on the arbitrary idea that Lott played more than half his career at the position and Rod did not. That leaves us, in terms of pure AV, with Fencik as the 13th-best post-merger safety. Here's the updated list:

1. Ronnie Lott (161)
2. Brian Dawkins (140)
3. Ed Reed (136)
4. Eugene Robinson (126)
5. Donnie Shell (120)
6. John Lynch (118)
6. Darren Sharper (118)
8. Troy Polamalu (115)
9. LeRoy Butler (111)
10. Lawyer Milloy (107)
11. Ken Houston (104)
11. Carnell Lake (104)
13. Gary Fencik (101)

But my gut is that Fencik was even better than that. In his first year as a starter (1977) the Bears were 17th in passing defense in terms of Adjusted Net Yards Per Pass Attempt (ANY/A). Between then and Fencik's retirement in 1987, they would only finish that low one other time, 17th again in strike-shortened 1982. For the other 9 seasons, they ranked 12th or higher, including five times in the top 6 and twice leading the league. Fencik was the key player and leader of those excellent secondaries, and the only player that was constant from the good Bears defenses of the late-70s through the mind-bogglingly dominant defenses of the mid-80s.

For my money, that sounds a lot better than, say, Carnell Lake - a very good player that was helped by playing on some very good defenses - or Lawyer Milloy - a player I always perceived as solid but not spectacular. The big difference between those guys and Fencik is that Fencik was hidden away for most of his career on pretty bad teams with good defenses that he led. Looking at that list, my gut tells me that Ronnie Lott, Ed Reed, Troy Polamalu, and Ken Houston are the elite of the elite - the sure-fire Hall-of-Famers (you have to think that both Reed and Polamalu will go in first-ballot). Brian Dawkins, Eugene Robinson, Donnie Shell, Darren Sharper - they feel to me a notch below that. If Lott, Reed, Polamalu, and Houston are the "elites," let's call these guys the "greats." They’re not quite Hall-of-Fame caliber, but almost. And that's the group I think Fencik belongs to. The others – Lynch, Butler, Milloy, Lake – they’re one more step down, to my mind. We can call them the “very goods” or some such. Fencik, I feel, is better than them.

I realize that I’m putting a lot of faith in my own instincts here, and it’s all awfully ambiguous, but I think I may be able to demonstrate it numerically. One thing I think AV is very good at is evaluating units within teams – if the defense was ranked, say, 5th in the league, well how much of that was owing to the defensive line, linebackers, secondary? This was the very question that Doug Drinen wanted to answer when he invented approximate value. He made two simple assumptions: first, success against the run was likely best credited to a combination of the defensive line and linebackers, and second, success against the pass was down to the defensive line and secondary. Clearly, math follows from those assumptions, but we’re not here to talk about math. We’re here to talk about Gary Fencik. In how many of his twelve seasons, all of them with the Bears, did he lead his secondary in AV? How about the same question applied to the others on the list?

What follows is a list of post-merger NFL safeties, sorted by the number of times they led their secondaries in AV. I don’t suggest this is a list of the best safeties of all-time, but I do suggest it as an alternative for fans to evaluate their favorite players at the safety position:

1.(1) Ronnie Lott - 9/14
1.(3) Ed Reed - 9/12
3.(8) Troy Polamalu - 8/12
4.(7) Darren Sharper - 7/14
4.(11) Ken Houston - 7/14
6.(5) Donnie Shell - 6.5/14
7.(2) Brian Dawkins - 5/16
7.(4) Eugene Robinson - 5/16
7.(13) Gary Fencik - 5/12
10.(9) LeRoy Butler - 4.5/12
11.(12) Carnell Lake - 4/12
12.(7) John Lynch - 3.5/15
13.(10) Lawyer Milloy - 2/15


That list has Gary Fencik tied for 7th among safeties, which jives with the way I felt about him. And yet I feel yucky. I started this article with a particular way I wanted to present a player to you, and I manipulated the statistical evidence until it said the thing that I wanted to say. I’ll reiterate what I said before: I think Gary Fencik is not-quite-a-Hall-of-Famer, a lot better than where NFL memory has left him. That’s my opinion, and I invite you to formulate your own. He’s a big executive at some investment bank in Chicago now, so I doubt he cares as he counts his millions.

It didn’t take millions of points for Fencik and the Bears to take care of the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 11. In fact, it took just 14, which was just enough, as the Chicago defense held the Eagles to just 10. Gary Fencik was a big part of the reason why. He stalked the Philly offense, racking up 9 tackles and forcing two fumbles on the way to a big upset win.

df 2.6.2016