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 Alabama‘s JC Latham, who was named to the All-SEC First Team by the AP and the conference coaches in 2023.
Click here for more draft tools:
2024 Mock Draft Simulator | 2024 Big Board | 2024 Draft Guide
2024 Player Profiles | 2024 Mock Drafts | NCAA Premium Stats
SCOUTING SUMMARY
Physically, Latham is a dream offensive tackle, placing well above the 50th percentile at the position in height, weight and length. Yet, he moves like a player who is 40 pounds lighter. His foot speed and coordination are impressive. He has the flexibility to sit low in his stance at the line of scrimmage for good leverage.
He is a true people-mover in zone and gap concepts and is a devastating combo blocker. He shows good hand usage and hand speed for baiting pass-rushers and resetting his hands after hand fighting. He sometimes struggles to anchor in pass protection, with his worst plays over the past two years coming against strong bull rushes.
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 LATHAM 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.
Latham’s reliability is uber-impressive, as he hasn't missed a single game over the last two seasons. His 80.8 pass-block grade on true pass sets is excellent, and even more impressive is that he’s achieved that on almost 550 snaps.
He’ll benefit from entering a zone scheme at the next level, as he’s been positively graded on 16% of such plays. And while he played the vast majority of his career snaps at right tackle, he also played 125 snaps at right guard, giving him some versatility, too.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Latham is in the mold of an offensive lineman who does not come around often. He will be just 21 during his rookie season, yet he has two years of starting experience in the SEC.
Despite drawing 18 penalties over the past two years and having room to improve in some anticipation parts of the position, Latham is a first-round trench player due to his rare combination of size, speed and refinement.
© 2024 PFF - all rights reserved.