• Abdul Carter offers an elite profile: With little concern for Carter’s prospect profile, he is already on a path to be considered an immediate impact player at the next level.
  
• Shemar Stewart and Mykel Williams‘ concerns: Both players offer strong athletic profiles, but as pass-rushers, they are far from finished products and have no guarantees of improving 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: 9 minutes

With the NFL draft right around the corner, there has been a significant amount of excitement surrounding this year’s edge defender class, specifically at the top. With several first-round defenders coming out this year, it’s worth diving into their production numbers from college to see how their analytical profiles compare to prospects of years past.

• Overall percentile rank references all prospects included in the rookie edge defender model, which takes into account a player’s career college production and metrics to create a score-based guidance system to understand who these players are and what we can expect from them for fantasy. 
• This model includes all 324 EDGE prospects since 2016.
• Strengths are considered production data points where a particular EDGE scored the highest in comparison to the prospect pool dating back to 2016.
• Weaknesses are the areas where a particular EDGE scored much lower relative to their strengths and when compared to the prospect pool since 2016.
• This article will be a spotlight on the top-five consensus edge defenders right now.

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Draft Position Rankings

ABDUL CARTER, PENN STATE

• No. 1 ranked edge defender on the PFF big board
• No. 1 ranked edge defender on consensus big boards

Carter’s career college analytics strengths:

As a pass-rusher, Carter is everything we could ask a prospect to be coming out of college, posting elite marks in every key pass-rushing metric. This resulted in a very high 4.7% sack rate for his college career, leading to 25 sacks. Those sack totals would not be possible on fewer than 550 pass-rush snaps without Carter being as effective and consistent as he was throughout his college career. 

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