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 Michigan‘s Junior Colson, who graded above 75.0 in his final two seasons in a dominant defense.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Colson grew up playing soccer in Haiti and began playing football when he moved to the U.S. He committed to Michigan and started 36 of his 41 games played in just three seasons.
He is a strong and reliable run defender who has good discipline at the line of scrimmage. His feel for coverage is also above average. He communicates well pre-snap and does not run himself out of plays with play-action or pre-snap motion.
His straight-line speed is decent, but his change-of-direction ability is tight (slower to flip the hip). Though he is good at sifting through chaos in run defense, he has some difficulties getting off blocks.
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 COLSON 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.
Colson is a very intelligent linebacker. You’re not going to find him out of position very often, which is important, given that he’s an average athlete.
His coverage ability shows up best in the slot, as he’s the 15th-highest-graded linebacker in slot coverage since 2021. While he gets hung up on blocks, he’s a very good tackler, having missed just 6.2% of his tackle attempts over his career.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Colson's background and journey to this point are inspiring. He has the size and football IQ to play in the NFL. He is a good but not great athlete, which will likely make him a Day 2 pick as a rotational 4-3 linebacker with starting potential.
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