• Mason Graham leads the way, as expected: Michigan’s star interior defensive lineman looks the part as both a pass rusher and run defender.
  
• Walter Nolen was productive in college, but there are some reasons for concern: Nolen’s underlying metrics may point to a player who slightly overachieved in the sack column and may still need development time in the NFL.
  
• 2025 NFL Draft season is here: Try PFF's best-in-class Mock Draft Simulator and learn about 2025's top prospects while trading and drafting for your favorite NFL team.

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

With the NFL offseason officially underway, so is the 2025 NFL Draft season. Plenty of fantasy football general managers are building their rookie draft boards for dynasty purposes.

Looking at how each position stacks up against one another from an analytics standpoint is just one of the many tools to consider during the evaluation process. This series focuses purely on the key stable metrics that translate, more often than not, from college to the NFL. It's a way for dynasty managers and fantasy managers, in general, to get familiar with this year’s rookie class.

A few notes about how this series will work:

• Rankings are based entirely on how these players performed in PFF’s stable metrics over the past two seasons.
• Athletic ability and size are not taken into account for this process. Again, this is just one of many evaluation tools to consider.
• This list includes all 36 interior defenders from the PFF big board but does not provide any weight to projected draft capital, competition level, or their overall ranking, though that context will often be provided.

TOP-10 INTERIOR PROSPECTS IN PFF PASS-RUSH GRADE SINCE 2023

Aeneas Peebles isn’t highly ranked on the PFF big board, but he does own the best cumulative pass-rush grade of any other interior defender in this class since 2023, and he is the only one to surpass a 90.0 grade. Peebles spent his final college season at Virginia Tech after previously spending four years at Duke. Peebles' final season at Duke resulted in a 90.1 pass-rush grade, and it was quite promising to see him replicate that score with a 91.2 pass-rush grade with the Hokies in 2024.

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