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 BYU‘s Kingsley Suamataia, who allowed only two sacks during his college career.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Suamataia is an impressive athlete with difference-making explosiveness and power in the run game. Whether blocking in man/gap or zone concepts, he has the upper- and lower-body strength to drive and displace.
In pass protection, his footwork is natural for a player of his size, but he doesn't move laterally as well as he does forward.
While he is a dream athlete for a tackle, his inexperience leaves his technique raw and inconsistent. His hand placement and timing are a work in progress, and he can sometimes be more of a shover than a true blocker.
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
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.
Suamataia could greatly benefit from a redshirt year in the NFL. He flashes the kind of athleticism and upside in pass protection that is worth taking a shot on. Since 2022, he posted the 13th-highest pass-blocking grade on plays with no play action.
The BYU tackle has given up just two career sacks, posted a 9-foot-2 broad jump (85th percentile) and turned 21 in January. It’s safe to say his best football is ahead of him.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Suamataia is a dream prospect to draft and develop somewhere on Day 2. I worry about him being baptized by fire if he is drafted in the first round and called upon to start right away.
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