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 Florida State‘s Jared Verse, who improved his pass-rush grade each of his four years in college, even after transferring to a higher level of competition in 2022.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Verse is a devastatingly powerful edge defender who brings the gym to the field on all three downs. After his 2020 season at Albany was canceled due to COVID-19, Verse and his father built a home gym, and he put on 40 pounds in one year. He came back and was an FCS All-American.
He transferred to Florida State the following season and displayed overwhelming strength against LSU in just his second game in the FBS.
His speed-to-power is consistently effective. His hands are powerful and violent, and his swipes look like they hurt. His best work comes from the power he generates as a three-point defensive end.
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 VERSE 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.
Verse has dominated everywhere he’s played. He posted a career pass-rush win rate of 20.4% and is an extremely polished pass-rusher.
He is also a solid run defender in a way that the other top edge defenders in this class aren’t. Though a lot of his production against the run came while at Albany, he’s forced a run stop on 7.5% of plays in his career, a very good mark.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Verse doesn't have the longest arms, and that shows up in some pass-rush counters and in his tackling, but he brings his hard hat and lunch pail to every snap, wins with strength regularly and is built like a first-rounder.
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