It is very hard to be a great safety from season to season in the NFL.
When we released our list of the league’s best safeties in 2021, we were pretty sure about the greatness of those players. Just five of the 11 players we listed last year made the cut this time around, and that’s with the move to a Top 13 in 2022, because the position has recently exploded in importance and excellence. We’ll eschew the spoilers for the repeat performers, but Anthony Harris, Harrison Smith, Jessie Bates III, Julian Blackmon, John Johnson III, and Darnell Savage aren’t in this list, and they were all in the mix last season.
In some cases, injuries were the reason — Julian Blackmon, for example. Other safeties simply didn’t perform up to their usual standards, and in most cases, we’re talking about fractions of regression — Jessie Bates, Darnell Savage, and Harrison Smith would certainly qualify there. Other safeties took time to find their way with new teams and new schemes — that would be the case for John Johnson III and Anthony Harris.
