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 Penn State’s Olumuyiwa Fashanu, who was named the Rimington-Pace Offensive Lineman of the Year in 2023.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
If it's true that offensive linemen are the best athletes on the field, Fashanu is the poster child. His pass-blocking work is so impressive because of his fast feet.
His power profile is adequate but not elite. In the run game, he does not pack a punch at contact and has some flexibility/footwork issues that prevent him from maintaining blocks. He uses a low-hands technique to compensate for a lack of natural pad leverage and keep pass rushers from knocking his hands away.
However, the low hands expose his chest too often. When he does get his arms up and in, he can anchor—even against good speed-to-power rushers.
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 FASHANU 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.
You won’t find a pass-blocking metric Fashanu isn’t near the top of. Over the last two years, he has earned an 89.3 pass-blocking grade and didn't allow a single sack across 646 snaps.
While he has a ways to go to develop his run blocking, Fashanu should make an immediate impact in an NFL team's passing game.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Fashanu is not only incredibly talented but will also be one of the youngest prospects in the 2024 class. He is the type of athlete in the trenches teams should draft in the first round, even if he needs to get stronger to live up to his very high potential.
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