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 look at Alabama‘s Dallas Turner, the 2023 consensus All-American and the SEC's Co-Defensive Player of the Year.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Turner, a former five-star recruit, played opposite Will Anderson Jr. during his first season as a starter and held his own. He developed his pass-rush plans from his physical gifts that year.
The following season, he added weight and strength to become a well-rounded and even more disruptive player. He continues to use the long arm successfully and can now generate even more movement on his speed-to-power reps.
He doesn't have the deepest pass-rush bag, but what he does, he does well. He was more of a stand-up rusher in Alabama’s system and appears to be most comfortable in that stance, though he can also rush with his hand in the dirt.
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 TURNER 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.
Turner generated a 19.6% pass-rush win rate in 2023, tallying 54 pressures and 10 sacks. He posted a 90.9 pass-rush grade on true pass rushes, an 87th-percentile mark.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Although he can continue to improve as a run defender and a tackler, Turner is a first-round type of edge rusher with high-ceiling pass-rush traits. He can contribute in Year 1 and has a bright future.
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