Dallas Turner

The median ranking for Turner was 11th overall. The Bleacher Report captured the overall sentiment behind Turner’s appeal in their scouting report – they ranked him 12th overall.

Dallas Turner might be the best pure athlete in this year's edge class. He has a good get-off and is a smooth-mover when working laterally. Not to mention his speed, which allows him to close on quarterbacks and make hustle plays down the field with chase-down tackles.

Turner's athleticism stands out as a pass-rusher, as he's able to execute a difficult ghost rush move at a high level. A lot of that has to do with his bend, as he has a limber lower half to turn tight corners at the top of the rush. The latter also pops up during his dip-rip move and when he wins around the edge in general.

This season, the Alabama product has also shown a little more nuance when rushing the passer by mixing up his speeds and using head/shoulder fakes during the stem phase of the rush. That has gotten offensive tackles to stop their feet and helped him become more effective when turning speed to power or as a bull-rusher.

There were concerns about his size, particularly as it relates to the run game, but there was justification for him to be considered a top-ten pick.

How Athletic is Dallas Turner?

Every fact about Dallas Turner’s straight-line speed is blistering. A 4.43-second 40-yard dash is fast for any position, full stop. But the fact that Turner did it without being a Randy Gregory-like 235 pounds (or, like Mohamoud Diabate, 225 pounds). Instead, Turner accomplished this feat at 247 pounds. He also exploded in the vertical leap, outjumping most receivers and corners at the NFL combine with a score of 40.5 inches.




We can marvel, and that’s fully appropriate. But it’s also nice to see it in positional context, so let’s do that. Below is a polar rose chart of his athletic scores – both measured in workouts and on the field – on a percentile basis. Importantly, these measures have all been adjusted for size.

This accounts for the problem above – running a 4.60-second 40-yard dash at 280 pounds is more impressive than running a 4.50-second 40-yard dash at 230 pounds, even if both are remarkable. In my research, size-adjusted metrics tend to predict NFL success more than raw metrics – particularly along the defensive line.

There are exceptions – particularly at receiver and cornerback – but that’s neither here nor there. We have a set of athletic measurements adjusted for Turner’s size and some athletic proxies from on-field player we can take a look at. We should also include his actual size for some comparison.



Turner is in the 99th percentile in size-adjusted 40-yard dash and size-adjusted 20-yard split. It turns out that he’s the marvel that the raw numbers suggest he is. But not all of it translates.

The ten-yard split – which carries more predictive power at the position than the 20-yard split or the 40-yard dash are merely high-level instead of devastatingly elite.

Excluded are the bench, because there’s very little research telling us about its relationship to on-field play, and the agilities, because Turner didn’t perform them. That’s a shame, because the agility scores give us the best athletic indicators of capability at the position.

Sometimes, there are ways to backfill in these scores, like reported scores from spring testing. Often these come from Bruce Feldman’s Freak List. But, what’s kind of stunning is that Turner was not the edge rusher isolated by the Freak List at the beginning of the year from Alabama – that was teammate Chris Braswell. Twice.

And the results on the field bear it out – Braswell’s get-off from the line of scrimmage is among the best in the FBS. Let’s talk about that metric.

The get-off measures above come from the charting provided by StatsBomb. The two measures – Elite Get-Off Distance and Max Get-Off Distance – measure on-field athleticism by looking at the pure distance a rusher achieves on the first second of the snap when shooting upfield on a pass rush.

There are two measures here, and the second is easier to explain than the first. The Max Get-Off Distance is the furthest that an edge rusher has traveled in any pass rush this year in the first full second coming off of the snap.

That’s pretty analogous to what we attempt to measure with the ten-yard split, but with a real, on-field measurement. But players don’t always achieve their maximums, nor are they attempting to on every play. This gives us potential in a different way but it doesn’t give us consistency. The first measurement, Elite Get-Off Distance, should get us a bit closer.

When a player hits the 90th percentile of his position in Get-Off Distance, that’s when StatsBomb says they’ve hit an “elite” distance – and the percentage of times a player can do that gives us some understanding of how often they can hit a high-level of burst.

Turner hits that mark 24 percent of the time, a high mark in the FBS. It’s not top-five, however. Third in the FBS in this measurement was Chris Braswell, Alabama’s selection for Feldman’s Freak List and second-round pick for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Ahead of him were Utah’s Jonah Elliss, drafted by the Denver Broncos, and a candidate for the first overall pick next year in James Pearce Jr. from Tennessee.

Turner is smaller than a typical edge, but the database this pulls from has no idea that modern NFL edge defenders have been getting smaller even since 2015. The height, weight and density aren’t particularly alarming but are notable. The arm length is astounding, however.

So, what do we get from this?

Turner is a very high-level athlete for his position. Going from just his combine measurements, he could be categorized as an elite athlete. But given all the other context – missing agility scores and his athletic impact on the field, he’s more of a “very high-level athlete” than an elite athlete.

Nevertheless, he was a better player than the bonified elite athlete playing across from him at Alabama.

Pass Rush Production Profile



Goodness.

Dallas Turner produces pressure. Who cares about the fact that you can be dazzled by his sacks when you can be dazzled by the pressures?

It is a little easy to be tricked by pass rush production profiles that compare to the rest of the FBS because most draft picks stuff the box score in these metrics — half of the edge rushers in the 2024 draft recorded a win rate above the 85th percentile. Let’s go over what those statistics are.

Win rate has been discussed here before but essentially just asks how often a pass rusher beats their blocker within the first 2.5 seconds of a play, whether or not it results in a pressure. It’s a much more stable statistic than pressure rate, which is more stable than sack rate.

PFF’s pass rush grade is self-explanatory but here is also split up in two other ways — pass rush grade on plays without play-action and pass-rush grade on “true passing sets,” which not only excludes play-action plays but quick passes, screens, roll-outs, passes with more than four seconds of time to throw and pass rushes with fewer than four pass rushers.

Excluding those plays improves the predictive power of PFF pass rush grade, which is good to see.

After that, we see pressure rate, as measured by Sports Info Solutions, and pressure rate on “true” pass rushes, using a similar definition to PFF. StatsBomb has their own pressure rate statistic, where Turner performs better than nearly any other edge rusher in the FBS — just behind Jalen Green, Mohamed Kamara and Laiatu Latu.

It’s important to acknowledge that different organizations have different methods of measuring pressure rate and sometimes those differences will produce unique results. For Turner, there’s a near-universal understanding that he’s one of the best in the FBS at producing pressure.

PFF pressure rate isn’t included here because of their use of win rate, which is more stable than pressure rate — the difference between a pressure and a “win” is outside of a pass rusher’s control, often dependent on quarterback tendency and play design. When they disagree, there’s room for what that might mean for the player or for the statistic.

In this case, there’s no reason to parse any of it — all of them regard Turner as a high-level player in pressure production.

The closest thing StatsBomb has to win rate is their ALOE statistic, which operates just as it does in the run defense version of the statistic explained above. When accounting for the expected engagement time of the block, Turner’s ability to beat his opponent is stunning.

They always ate after the games. Alabama would play a slugfest against LSU, and afterward, Dallas Turner would snake through the parking lot and find his father, Delon, and together they would escape to a booth tucked away in some Tuscaloosa restaurant.

One night during Dallas’ freshman year, they settled on Buffalo Wild Wings. Dallas scrolled silently on his iPad during the short drive.

“What are you doing?” Delon asked his son.

“Looking at the cut-ups (of the game),” Dallas responded.

“Didn’t you just play?” Delon asked.

“I didn’t really play,” Dallas said.

Delon sensed the frustration. His son had been a star for as long as he could remember, impacting games the way few others could. Dallas was a two-time defensive player of the year in South Florida’s Broward County, one of the most talent-rich areas in the country. He played at high-profile high schools: American Heritage and Saint Thomas Aquinas. He became a five-star recruit and the No. 1 edge rusher in the 2021 recruiting class.

Now Dallas wasn’t the man. He sat behind future top-10 pick Will Anderson Jr., among others, and began to realize he might have to wait his turn. Seated across from his father at Buffalo Wild Wings, Dallas steamed.

“If I’m not starting by the next two games,” Dallas said, “something is going to happen.”

“What are you going to do?” Delon asked.

“You’ll see,” Dallas said. “You’ll see.”

Ask people at Alabama what comes to mind when they think of Dallas Turner, and their answers sound scripted.

“He’s freakish,” said David Ballou, Alabama’s director of sports performance.

“He’s a freak from the standpoint of size, strength and speed,” said Ken Whisenhunt, a special assistant under Saban in 2023.

“Freaky athlete,” said Coleman Hutzler, Alabama’s outside linebackers coach for the past two seasons.

The data backs up the eye test.

Leaving Alabama, Turner weighed 247 pounds (with 218 1/2 pounds of lean mass, according to Ballou) and ran a 4.46-second 40-yard dash. His arm length (34 3/8 inches) is well above the NFL average, and his 40 1/2-inch vertical leap was the best among edge rushers at the NFL Scouting Combine. He ranked 85th out of 1,637 tracked defensive ends from 1987 to 2024 in relative athletic score.



Explosiveness is partially what put Turner on Alabama’s radar. He recorded 16 sacks as a junior in high school and 13 more as a senior. Florida and Georgia wanted him, but one weekend, Dallas and Delon attended an Alabama game. As AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” blasted through the Bryant-Denny Stadium speakers on third down, father and son fixated on Anderson, then a freshman pass rusher who consistently sidestepped blockers and engulfed the quarterback.

“That’s a freshman,” Dallas whispered to his father.

“He’s pretty good,” Delon said.

“Yeah,” Dallas said. “I want to be better than him.”

After that weekend, Delon thought his son would commit to the Crimson Tide.

“Everybody has a rabbit that they’re chasing from a mental standpoint or somebody they think they want to catch up to,” Delon said. “That’s what he saw. That’s one of the things that drove him there: wanting to get on the field and do what Will did as a freshman.”

Initially, Anderson teased Turner about being “fat.” “They might have to switch you to defensive line,” Anderson would tell him.

Buried in the jokes, however, was a level of respect. Anderson noticed the way Turner watched him. The freshman’s knowledge of the game impressed him, and Anderson even acknowledged it was better than his own at that time.

Together, they absorbed fierce coaching from veteran defensive assistant Sal Sunseri.

“Just know we got motherf—– every day,” Anderson said.

“Here’s the bottom line,” Sunseri said. “You ain’t there to be their friend. You’re there to get the max out of them. So that on draft day they ain’t sitting there with their thumb up their ass. If you want to be a soft-ass coach, then be a soft-ass coach. But if you want to take a kid to the ultimate potential he can possibly be, then you demand it every day.”

Dallas called home. He asked his father why Sunseri didn’t like him. Delon, who played college basketball for Florida A&M and was once nicknamed “Baby Barkley” by Dick Vitale on national television (before playing professionally overseas for more than a decade), explained to his son that Sunseri’s old-school, in-your-face style would work.

The coach would tear him down and build him back up to a level he’d never seen before, and he’d be better for it. Don’t complain. Don’t pout. Embrace the work and believe in the long-term benefits.

“He was just so passionate because he wanted us to be great,” Anderson said. “He trained us to be relentless, and that’s what we became.”

“Alabama was a very difficult place to be successful,” Delon said. “It was a very challenging atmosphere, and it’s not made for everybody. I remember when Dallas got there and he told me: ‘Dad, those stars don’t mean anything now. You’ve got to start over. And you’ve got to fight your way back up to the top.’”

Ken Whisenhunt coordinated offenses in the NFL from 2004 to 2019, and when Brian Flores’ name is brought up, you can almost hear the frustration and disgust.

“You just had to be so prepared,” Whisenhunt said. “It was the hardest thing.”

Blitzers came from all areas at all times. Sometimes none came at all. The more versatile the player, the harder to discern whether he was blitzing.

That led the conversation to Turner, whom Whisenhunt believes can line up anywhere. The edge? No problem. The interior on pass-rush downs? Sure thing, especially with his ability to bend and squeeze his way past stiff guards. Off the ball as a quasi-linebacker? He believes Turner can do that, too.

And he’s not alone. Saban compared Turner to longtime New England Patriots stalwart Dont’a Hightower, whose size, speed and smarts anchored the Patriots’ elite defense for a decade. Hutzler added: “Some guys, you put them back there, and they can’t read and diagnose. Dallas can.”

So then what, if anything, does Turner have to work on? Who better to ask than the reigning NFL defensive rookie of the year who just made the transition from Alabama to the pros at the same position?

“In college, you can run over people and speed by them,” Anderson said. “In the NFL, it’s more about technique. The tackles are more sound. They’re no more physical than tackles in college, but they just have better technique.”

Anderson cited Jonathan Greenard (his former teammate and now a Vikings edge rusher) as a key contributor to his growth. He has no doubt Turner can duplicate or even outperform his own success.

“He’s one of a kind,” Anderson said. “He’s just so bendy and electric off the edge. The sky is the limit for Dallas.”

Athleticism? Check. Professionalism? Check. Work habits? Check.

Tough skin to take direct coaching from a coordinator? Check.

Can you once and for all explain all the draft capital that went into McCarthy and Dallas Turner? — George B.

This is the mental version of a tongue twister. Let’s call it a mind-bender.

The simplest way to explain it is with a table. Here goes nothing:



What sort of role do you see for Dallas Turner? — Cade D.

Andrew Van Ginkel is rehabbing from a foot injury he suffered in last year’s regular-season finale, but if he returns for training camp, I expect him to start at edge rusher alongside Jonathan Greenard.

In that case, Turner would begin the season as an interchangeable pass rusher on the edge, but I also think defensive coordinator Brian Flores would deploy him on third downs and in additional exotic packages. Turner would likely ascend to every-down status, even playing off the ball if necessary, toward the back half of the season.

Turner’s development will likely hinge on two facets: improved pass-rush technique and increased girth to set the edge against the run. This will be a (positive) push-pull. Turner’s body type aligns perfectly with the versatility Flores seeks, and if his current weight is enough to hold up against the run, then it’s gravy.

Turner gravitated to the gridiron from an early age.

“I’m the only 6- or 7-year-old out there with NFL-issued apparel,” Turner told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “That really pushed my direction into the sport of football.”

Turner, selected by the Vikings seven spots after quarterback J.J. McCarthy in the first round of the NFL draft in April, has been molded for this moment by the pressure cookers that are South Florida youth football and Alabama college football. He thrived under coaches Nick Saban and Jason Taylor, the former NFL Defensive Player of the Year, leaving those around him with little concern about how he’ll transition to the grandest stage.

“He has stood out on every level he’s played on,” Delon Turner said. “He’s played a ton of NFL guys, so they just kind of feed into each other, follow each other and push each other to get to that level.”

Surrounded by NFL influences

Before he hunted quarterbacks, Dallas Turner was a heat-seeking running back for the West Pine Panthers youth football team in Pembroke Pines, Fla.

“But I always saw myself playing defense, because of how physical I’d play,” Turner said.

Wright, his cousin, would go to Turner’s games and tell him, “Hey, man, when you’re in the open like that, run to the end zone instead of trying to run into somebody and run them over.”

Turner said he played various skill positions until eighth grade, when Pat Surtain, the former All-Pro NFL cornerback who was then the head coach at American Heritage School, asked to see Turner run a pass-rushing drill.

“I guess I did a little move he liked,” Turner said, “and it was no looking back.”

Turner quickly became known around the area as the “next Brian Burns,” said Delon Turner, referring to the Giants star pass rusher, who was a senior when Dallas was in seventh grade at American Heritage, a K-12 program that Turner attended from the beginning.

On Sunday, Turner and Burns will be on opposite sidelines for the season opener at MetLife Stadium. One of their former coaches, American Heritage assistant head coach Daryl Porter, will watch proudly.

“Those guys are just freakish,” said Porter, a former NFL safety. “You don’t find those guys often. Someone who can bend and be very in tune with how to play defensive end. Dallas can jump out of the gym, and Burns is Spider-Man for real.”
Turner became a two-time Broward County Defensive Player of the Year in football. At this year’s NFL scouting combine, Turner ran the fastest 40-yard dash (4.46 seconds) and jumped the highest (40.5 inches) among all edge rushers.

Porter said he thought Turner could have gone pro in basketball, recalling “windmill dunks” in high school that screamed NBA potential. The love of basketball runs in the family. A photo of Dallas’ Team USA minicamp group, which included former Minnehaha Academy star and Orlando Magic guard Jalen Suggs, rests on the Turner family mantle. His younger brother, Denver, just enrolled to play basketball at IMG Academy, a Florida high school built to craft D-I athletes. Delon played at Florida A&M and spent 11 years touring Europe in professional leagues.

“You saw he was a freakish athlete,” Porter said. “It was really only himself standing in his way.”

As a senior in high school, Dallas made an important decision to take his talent to a new setting: St. Thomas Aquinas, where Taylor, a former All-Pro pass rusher for the Dolphins, was the defensive coordinator.

“Taylor took him under his wing,” Delon Turner said. “If you can learn from one of the best to ever do it, why not him? And I think they both clicked and fed into each other, and he really pushed Dallas to go to another level.”

Seasoned in the SEC

Dallas Turner was a coveted five-star prospect who made the controversial decision to leave South Florida and the University of Miami, where Taylor now coaches, for the NFL pipeline at Alabama. He joined a loaded edge rusher group led by Will Anderson Jr., who was drafted No. 3 overall by the Texans in 2023.

But just six games into Turner’s first SEC campaign, he was vaulted into the starting lineup because of injuries. Before the game, Saban called Taylor to get his thoughts on starting the 18-year-old Dallas.

“[Taylor] told him, ‘Yeah, I groomed him, why not?’ ” Delon Turner recalled.

Quick adjustments are necessary under Saban, the demanding champion considered the best college football coach of all time. Turner said those who could and couldn’t handle the high standards were immediately exposed.

“That means we practice at the hottest time of the day so we could withstand any conditions,” Turner said. “Practices were long and hard, but that made us.”

Alabama’s coaches let players uphold the standard, naming Turner a team captain during his final, SEC Defensive Player of the Year season.

“Very player-led,” Turner said. “Someone would mess up in practice, it’d look real bad, the players would be the ones to say things first before the coaches.”

Turner’s tear through college football’s toughest conference included 10 sacks in 14 games last season, including one on McCarthy in the national championship game. He built a reputation as a punishing hitter, famously stepping over the line with a helmet-to-helmet hit on LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels that was flagged last fall.

“That is just how I play,” Turner said. “I don’t intend to be dirty or nothing like that on my hits. I just play between the whistles. I just play 100 percent every game.”

Ready to rush the passer?

Turner’s NFL dream took longer than expected. He was the third defender selected, but his wait lasted until the 17th overall pick due to the NFL’s offensive arms race. A record 14 straight offensive players were selected to begin the draft.
The Vikings waited long enough. They traded up six spots to add one of their highest-ranked pass rushers. When Turner got the call from the Vikings draft room, he was told, “Make sure I’m ready to rush the passer as soon as I get off the plane.”

Turner practiced varied roles during his first training camp, aligning against guards as well as offensive tackles. With McCarthy out for the season with a knee injury, Turner is the first-round pick who can make the quickest impact for the Vikings. He’s expected to grow into a full-time starter for defensive coordinator Brian Flores, but Turner will begin as a reserve behind veteran edge rushers Jonathan Greenard and Andrew Van Ginkel.

“We’ve got a role envisioned for Dallas, and that changes,” Flores said. “If he’s got the hot hand, we’ll leave him in. If it’s what we expected, then we’ll keep it as we planned.”

Turner hasn’t been a typical quiet rookie, said left tackle Christian Darrisaw. He’s been vocal with veteran players on both sides of the ball, looking for tips wherever he can.

“Nothing but positives,” Flores said. “He’s like a sponge in that group as far as extracting information and finding ways to apply that with his skillset. … They’re great with him, telling him, ‘Dallas, you can do X, Y, Z, go do it.’ And normally he gets it done.”

If Turner is ready to make the NFL leap, how high can he go?

“I just want to win. That’s my main goal in Minnesota,” Turner said. “We’re not a superstar or a one-man show type of defense. Everybody is going to make their plays. In the type of style we run, somebody is going to make a play. Really just go out there and have fun with my teammates: running around and hitting people.”