This week
A.J. is on the road against PIT. We project 2.8 tackles. The number comes out of a drive-level simulation of the game rather than a season average — it asks how many possessions his side is likely to get, what they do with them, and how much of that flows through him.
How much he's on the field
Across 20 games, A.J. has been on the field for 96% of his team's snaps. That's a full-time role. Snap share at this level is the most stable input we have — it changes slowly, and it survives a bad game in a way that yardage never does. The model weighs this above efficiency for a simple reason: snap share predicts next week better than last week's yardage does.
What kind of defensive back he is
A.J. has 80 tackles across 20 games — 4 a game. Tackle volume is a strange stat for a defensive back: the best coverage players sometimes post the fewest, because nothing is thrown their way. A rising tackle count can mean he's playing well in run support or that receivers are catching the ball in front of him, and the box score can't tell you which.
His last 5 games
Over that stretch A.J. has 24 tackles. Five games is a small sample in any sport and a tiny one in football, where a team plays seventeen times a year — so recent form informs the projection without overriding the usage underneath it.
How the model reads him
Every projection here is built the same way for A.J. as for a starter on a contender — simulate the game, then apportion it by role. No manual adjustments, no gut calls on who's due. The weighting behind it is proprietary and re-tuned on real outcomes; everything it produces is public and graded against the box score.
What we'd flag
Three things to carry. The season is seventeen games, so most trends here are small samples wearing a confident number. Game script rewrites usage — a team trailing throws, a team ahead runs. And injury news lands after we publish.