The 2024 NFL Draft is fast approaching. The PFF big board is live, mock draft season is in full swing and the 2024 NFL Scouting Combine has wrapped up.
This year’s offensive line draft class boasts plenty of high-end talent. Notre Dame’s Joe Alt and Oregon State’s Taliese Fuaga are among the headliners, though top interior players like Oregon’s Jackson Powers-Johnson are also being selected in the first round of mock drafts.
With 12 offensive linemen in the top 50 of PFF’s big board, it’s an excellent year to need offensive line help.
Let's look at Georgia‘s Amarius Mims, one of the biggest winners of the NFL scouting combine.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
It's hard to believe how the 6-foot-7, 340-pound Mims can sit in his stance and run to cover ground. He also has elite length for the position.
While his physical potential is through the roof, he lacks experience. He played only 682 snaps over the past two seasons due to biding his time at a talented program and injury in 2023.
He is a strong player who can maintain blocks well with good upper-body strength. Mims is smoother than he is truly explosive as an athlete, which takes away some of his punch at contact.
His feet are also a bit slow in pass protection, which can cause some clunky kickbacks and oversetting.
WINS ABOVE AVERAGE
WAA represents the number of wins a player is worth over an average college football player and is a metric evaluators can utilize to assess performance.
It combines how well a player performed in each facet of play (using PFF grades) and how valuable each facet is to winning football games. The result is a first-of-its-kind metric that allows for cross-positional valuation and predicts future value at the player and team levels.
HOW MIMS RANKS IN THE STABLE METRICS
The PFF pass-blocking grade does a fine job of describing an offensive lineman’s success as a pass-blocker, but it becomes even more stable when isolated to just “true pass sets.”
True pass sets are plays without play-action, screens and designed rollouts where there are at least four pass-rushers and the quarterback stands in the pocket for at least 2.1 seconds. Isolating more specific situations helps us project a lineman’s future pass-blocking performance.
Run blocking is generally a stable measure of play. However, negatively graded plays are more stable for offensive tackles, while positively graded plays tend to fluctuate. The opposite is true for guards and centers on the interior.
Mims enters the NFL with only 775 snaps under his belt and enormous room for growth. During that relatively limited playing time, Mims flashed incredible play, showing the upside of a top tackle in the NFL.
The 6-foot-7, 340-pounder allowed a 1.5% pressure percentage during his time at Georgia and was the second-ranked tackle in PFF’s pass-blocking efficiency metric in 2023.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Mims is not a polished prospect—he's a level below former teammate and first-round pick Broderick Jones—but he brings sky-high potential. He'll take some developing, but trench players built like this don't make it out of the top 50.
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