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 Notre Dame‘s Joe Alt, the third-highest-graded offensive tackle over the last two college seasons.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Alt is an unquestionable first-round offensive lineman on film, bringing a high football IQ at just 21 years old. He started as a true freshman at Notre Dame and played more than 2,200 snaps in his three-year career. Despite being 6-foot-8, he has the flexibility to get in a three-point stance and maintain good drive and leverage off the snap.
His footwork is so quick for a player of his size, and his balance and core strength stand out. He is effective in both gap- and zone-blocking schemes.
His only true weaknesses come from overextending his arms and getting off balance to dictate contact and his lack of density when absorbing 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 ALT 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.
Alt will enter the league as one of the soundest pass-blocking prospects in recent memory.
The Notre Dame tackle played 300-plus pass-blocking snaps in all three of his college seasons and bettered his pressure rate every year. He is also a fantastic run-blocker, having posted three straight run-blocking grades above 75.0.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
The NFL draft is all about finding players with size, speed and strength who have the IQ to use those traits optimally. That's Joe Alt, and that should spell a top-10 selection as a future long-term tackle.
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