Georgia’s Mykel Williams is considered one of the top edge rushers in the draft, a likely late 1st- or early 2nd-round pick. He had 5.0 sacks this year and 14 in three years in Athens.
Bradyn Swinson is also considered a top-10 edge, a likely early-to-mid 2nd-round pick. He had 13 ½ sacks in five combined seasons at Oregon and LSU.
Nick Scourton will probably get picked late in the first round or early in the second round. He had five sacks in his one year at Texas A&M and 17 total sacks in three years of college football.
Scourton’s teammate, Shemar Stewart, is another top-10 edge prospect. He recorded 4 ½ total sacks in three seasons in College Station.
Tennessee’s James Pearce Jr. could be drafted somewhere in the 20-to-25 range, and he was tied for 37th in the BCS this year with 7 ½ sacks.
You get the picture.
When teams scout pass rushers, sack production is only part of the equation. So much goes into evaluating an edge rusher. That’s why you get a guy like Trent Cole, who only had 19 sacks in three years at Cincinnati but became one of the greatest pass rushers in Eagles history but a guy like Derek Barnett, who had 33 sacks in three seasons at Tennessee, fails to make a significant impact (other than recovering a very important fumble).
The Eagles, after losing Josh Sweat and Brandon Graham and with question marks surrounding Bryce Huff, are in the market for an edge rusher early in next week’s draft – perhaps at No. 32. And Howie Roseman spoke Tuesday about the challenge of figuring out a player’s value when his sack production has been limited.
“First thing you have to figure out is what they're being asked to do (in college),” Roseman said. “I think there are certain defensive college schemes that try to maximize their players in other ways. We've had schemes here that are asking our defensive players to have different responsibilities, so we’ve got to first understand what their job description is.
“We also have to see them in those specific situations. We will make tapes that are a 3rd-and-5 plus. What do these guys look like when they're in must-pass situations? The tools in their body.
“I think that we get a lot of information through this process from watching them do drills, figuring out who has vision for the quarterback. So certainly production's a part of what we're looking for on guys, but there are also extenuating circumstances.”
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Georgia has been absolutely loaded on the defensive line in recent years. In Nolan Smith’s final season in Athens, the Bulldogs had 17 players with at least one sacks … but none with more than 4 ½. Including Mykel Williams, Jalon Walker, Jalen Carter and Smith.
Another is traits. Look at Texas A&M’s Stewart. He had exactly 1 ½ sacks in each of his three seasons, which is essentially non-existent production. But scouts love his explosiveness, his length, his first step and his athleticism, and he’ll get drafted fairly high because of the player he projects to be in a year or two, not because of what he did at A&M.
Sweat was certainly not a big-time pass rusher at Florida State. He had 14 ½ total sacks from 2015 through 2017, and 60 BCS players had more during that three-year span. And his Eagles career started out slowly, with just 10 sacks in his first three years. But from 2021 through 2024, he had 33 sacks, then 2 ½ more in the Super Bowl leading to that four-year, $76.4 million contract with the Cards.
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The two players the Eagles have drafted with the most college sacks are 1995 1st-rounder Mike Mamula, who had 41 sacks at Boston College, and Barnett, their 1st-round pick in 2017, who had 33, breaking Reggie White’s Vols record.
Mamula never had more than 8 ½ sacks in a season and Barnett never had more than 6 ½.
The reality is that the correlation between college production and NFL success is a tenuous one.
Jaylon Ferguson had 43 sacks in three years at Louisiana Tech, where he was a teammate of Milton Williams. That’s the most sacks by any BCS player in the last 20 years. He had 4 ½ in his brief NFL career with the Ravens.
Yet Chandler Jones had just 10 sacks in three years at Syracuse but had 112 in his 11-year NFL career.
So if the Eagles wind up drafting one of the guys who didn’t have a huge sack total in college, it doesn’t mean they blew the pick. It just means Roseman knows college sacks aren’t always the best predictor of NFL sacks.