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 class of linebackers features freaky athletes like Texas A&M’s Edgerrin Cooper and well-rounded players like North Carolina State’s Payton Wilson.
Let's look at Texas A&M‘s Edgerrin Cooper, who earned the highest grade at his position in 2023.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Cooper is a very athletic linebacker. He possesses top-tier change of direction, burst and pursuit speed. His best work comes when he keeps things in front of him, flying in for tackles at the line of scrimmage or toward the sidelines.
Cooper's issues come from reacting more than anticipating. He is manipulated off his spot too often against play action and pre-snap motion. He also tends to overpursue tackles, though he was more consistent in 2023.
He earned a high coverage grade in 2023, but that was more from defending shallow zones, running backs out of the backfield and QB scrambles than it was from deeper zone assignments.
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 COOPER RANKS IN THE STABLE METRICS
The linebacker position is less stable and harder to project than other front-seven positions.
PFF coverage grade is easier to project from year to year if a player plays a similar role. However, it's much more complicated when a linebacker moves to slot corner or strong safety and vice versa.
Isolating performances in specific alignments — snaps from in the box or slot — provides a lot of helpful information.
Forced incompletion rate is relatively stable from season to season, which makes it an important number when projecting future 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.
Cooper boasts 98th-percentile arm length and ran a 94th-percentile 40-yard dash, and those measurables show up on tape.
Although he struggled in the slot, he earned the 12th-highest grade at the position in single coverage (71.9). He’s a force against the run, having put up an 11.4% run-stop rate and 33 tackles for loss or no gain over his career.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Cooper has the length and athleticism to be a starting-caliber linebacker in the NFL in a downhill role. However, his lack of anticipation and instincts for deeper coverage work will likely keep him from being picked in the first round.
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