Player Development

Before we get into the recent history of “project” pass rushers, let’s first define a “project with upside” edge rusher.

The website Relative Athletic Scores can help us. RAS takes a combination of pro day scores (Combine results in past years) and size data and to determine a percentile of athleticism for each player. For example, Danielle Hunter scored a 9.89 out of 10, which means he was nearly in the 99th percentile in terms of athleticism among all DE prospects since results became available.

Hunter is the oft-used example for raw athletes who made it big but he isn’t the proper comparison for potential Vikings targets in this year’s draft. He was a third-round pick, meaning the NFL didn’t see his technical skills being strong enough to be worth a first-round selection. Of course, they were wrong but the first-round prospects from this year’s class are considered better football players than Hunter was back in 2015. So we shouldn’t use anyone past the third round to compare to this year’s class because those are longshots and outliers. Hunter just so happens to be the best longshot/outlier.

We need to take the high-level athletes who are projected in the first or second round and put them against first and second-round defensive ends from years past who had high RAS scores in order to get a clearer picture of the odds of a raw prospect being a hit.

Here are the players who fit the description from this year’s draft:

Jayson Oweh — 9.92 out of 10
Jaelan Phillips — 9.87
Payton Turner — 9.74
Joseph Ossai — 9.49
Carlos Basham — 9.38
Kwity Paye — 9.34
Joe Tryon — 9.29
Azeez Ojulari — 8.17

Another subset of the elite athlete DEs that we need to take out is picks in the top 10 because A) No DE is projected to go in the top 10 this year B) the Vikings don’t pick in the top 10 and C) we can assume if a player was an elite athlete and picked in the top 10, they were a different caliber of prospect from a technical perspective than the 2021 group has to offer. You may have heard, “there is no Nick Bosa in this class.”

Comparing sack numbers from college isn’t particularly helpful in this instance either. We’re better off trusting the league’s opinion of our rushers based on where they were picked than comparing players with all types of different college circumstances by a single flawed statistic.

So here are the pass rushers since 2011 (with RAS data available) who have RAS over 8.0 (80th percentile) and were selected in the first or second round but not in the top 10:

2011 — JJ Watt (11th), Robert Quinn (14th), Ryan Kerrigan (16th), Cam Jordan (24th)
2012 — Melvin Ingram (18th), Chandler Jones (21st), Whitney Mercilus (26th), Nick Perry (28th), Andre Branch (38th)
2013 — Datone Jones (26th), Margus Hunt (53rd)
2014 — Dee Ford (23rd), Trent Murphy (47th), Jeremiah Attaochu (50th)
2015 — Bud Dupree (22nd), Preston Smith (38th), Randy Gregory (60th)
2016 — Shaq Lawson (19th), Emmanuel Ogbah (32nd), Noah Spence (39th)
2017 — Haason Reddick (13th), Taco Charlton (28th), TJ Watt (30th), Tyus Bowser (47th)
2018 — Marcus Davenport (14th), Harold Landry (41st), Uchenna Nwosu (48th), Kemoko Turay (52nd) Tyquan Lewis (64th)
2019 — Rashan Gary (12th), Brian Burns (16th), Montez Sweat (26th), Ben Banogu (49th)

Now the tough part: How do we figure out how many of these high-ceiling prospects turned into hits?

There isn’t one perfect metric, so the best place to start is to give us a broad idea of the success or failure of our group is to look at how many became starters,* how many became Pro Bowlers and how many became All-Pros.

*Pro-Football Reference’s draft pages use snap counts to determine whether a player is considered a starter during their career. We will include multi-year starters except for 2019.*

Here’s the results:

— 19 of 33 starters
— 8 Pro Bowlers
— 5 Pro Bowlers were All-Pros

The 2011 and 2012 drafts were incredible for wildly athletic pass rushers. In fact, there hasn’t been an All-Pro fitting our criteria from any draft since and only one Pro Bowler.

The list requires a closer look at the 11 non-Pro Bowl starters since most players who are drafted in the first or second round will get a chance to start but that doesn’t mean they were hits in the draft.

Here are the players who are clear hits despite not being a Pro Bowler:

Whitney Mercilus (54.0 career sacks)
Bud Dupree (31.0 sacks over the last four seasons)
Preston Smith (40.5 sacks in six years)
Brian Burns (16.5 sacks in two years)
Montez Sweat (16.0 sacks in two years)

Beyond that group, there’s a lot of good single seasons. Haasan Reddick had 12.5 sacks last year. Harold Landry had a 9.0 sack season. Nick Perry had one double-digit sack season. Rashan Gary was decent last year. That bunch probably lands below the threshold of being hits but aren’t exactly big misses either.

Then there’s the busts who offered very little value over replacement. Trent Murphy, Datone Jones, Shaq Lawson, Emmanual Ogbah, Noah Spence, Margus Hunt, Taco Charlton and Tyquan Lewis all fall in that category.

We end up with this:

— 21% became Pro Bowlers
— 22% were good starters but not Pro Bowlers
— 12% contributed something but weren’t good starters
— 45% did not turn into significant contributors or were busts

What do we make of this distribution? It’s noticeable that there are more busts than Pro Bowlers but 43% of the players were hits and 55% became something.

That doesn’t really lend itself to a lot of confidence in the boom-or-bust prospects. But for comparison’s sake we have to look at our non-elite athletes in the first round. Without putting you through all the names, here’s the finding:

— Out of 24 defensive ends that had below 80th percentile athleticism and were taken outside the top 10 within the first two rounds, only two became Pro Bowlers, five offered something as either decent starters or rotational rushers and 17 were busts.

That makes 70% busts.

Even though we’re dealing with small samples, the numbers seem to compellingly suggest that if the Vikings have plans to take a pass rusher in the first or second round, they would be much wiser picking one of the elite athletic project players than they would taking anyone who falls below the “elite athlete” threshold.