Shutdown Cornerbacks In baseball you'll often find that great pitchers can tame the top sluggers in a showdown. Likewise, in the NFL, the top cover corners can take on even the best pro football wideouts and keep them contained. Which cornerback dyanamic duos were able to clamp down on the starting Wide Receivers the best in 2002?

Measuring an individual player's contributions in football is very difficult. Unlike many team sports where the players have very isolated actions, in football everything that happens is connected to a whole host of the participants. This is particularly true for defensive players, and the numbers we are about to present are admittedly imperfect gauges of the true talents of the specific corners listed. A cornerback is dependent on a good pass rush, a solid rushing defense to set up predictable passing downs, sound coaching schemes, even the offensive performance of his team. Then of course the officials can have some influence too!

All this is to say that cornerbacks on different teams have different "degrees of difficulty" to their roles.

Nonetheless, the following statistics show how teams defensed the starting/top two wide receivers of the opposing team throughout the season. All plays where a pass was directed to one of the two "prime target" WR's is counted, with such things as a defensive pass interference call counting as a "completed" pass for the appropriate yardage to fully reflect what took place.