No projection this week
Darius doesn't have a projection right now — either his team is on a bye, the week's slate hasn't been simulated yet, or he isn't in a position to draw usage. His game log and the usage read below are the real record either way, and this page picks him back up as soon as there's a game to simulate.
How much he's on the field
Across 11 games, Darius has been on the field for 39% of his team's snaps. That's a limited role, and it caps everything else on this page. A player on a third of the snaps can't produce like a starter no matter how efficient he is, and the projection reflects the opportunity rather than the talent. 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 lineman he is
Darius has 3.5 sacks and 14 tackles across 11 games. Sacks are the stat everyone quotes and the least stable one on this page — they arrive in bunches, they depend on coverage holding up behind him, and a lineman can win every rep for a month without one. Snap count and pressure rate describe a pass rusher far better than a sack total does, which is why his projection moves less on a big game than you'd expect.
His last 5 games
Over that stretch Darius has 12 tackles and 3 sacks. Worth noting: his snap share is trending up — 52% lately against 39% overall. 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 Darius 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. For Darius specifically, he's on the field for a minority of snaps, which caps the projection regardless of how he's playing.