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 defensive line class features a wide variety of skill sets and many potential impact players. UCLA’s Laiatu Latu and Alabama’s Dallas Turner headline the edge defender group, while Texas’ Byron Murphy II and Illinois’ Jer’Zhan Newton provide high-end talent along the interior.
Let's take a look at Penn State edge defender Chop Robinson,
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Robinson is an alien-like athlete. He makes some jaw-dropping plays where he can fire off the line and get into the backfield with ease. However, outside of his first step and fast hands, he is an incomplete pass-rusher.
Most of his backfield production comes from him feasting off inferior tackles. He could also struggle with length against NFL-caliber tackles.
His pass-rush profile needs to expand, as he does not have a regular rotation of pass-rush moves or counters when he doesn’t win with athleticism off the jump. He is a strong run defender but has some reps where he gets out of his gap to try to make a play.
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 PLAYER RANKS IN THE STABLE METRICS
PFF pass-rush grade is one of the most stable measures of play, as it isolates a pass-rusher’s ability to win, how quickly he wins and how well he finishes plays.
The quicker the rusher defeats the blocker, the higher his grade will be. And given the hundreds of one-on-one interactions over a given season, this grade is very stable from year to year.
PFF pass-rush grade is strong on its own, but we can also use it to gauge performance in “must pass” situations.
Pressure percentage and win percentage are also strong measures of play and are far better than just using sack totals to evaluate a pass-rusher’s performance.
PFF run-defense grade is also very stable from year to year, while run-stop percentage is a good measure of playmaking in the run game.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Regardless of his lack of polish, Robinson is a gifted athlete — likely on a level that is top of the class. A lot of what leaves you wanting more from Robinson is coachable. Unlocking that is the key for him to go from a boom-or-bust athlete to a dominant edge defender.
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