There was a recent report floating around from ESPN’s Matt Miller saying people around the league believe the most likely scenario for the Tennessee Titans at No. 11 overall in the 2023 NFL draft is for the team to target an edge rusher.
Despite the obvious needs on offense, it’s pretty clear at that Tennessee’s best chance to compete in 2023 is to field a dominant defense that can prevent these high-powered offenses from running up the score.
Should the Titans decide to go this route, they’re in luck because this is one of the deepest groups of edge rushers in quite some time.
Similarly to the cornerbacks, the consensus currently has 15 edge rushers ranked within the top 100 (tied for most). I also have a matching 15 pass rushers who graded within the top 100 in my personal rankings, although my list definitely differed from the overall consensus at several different spots.
Nonetheless, before we go into all that, it’s time to provide some background information on how everything works for those who need a reminder.
Over the last couple of months, I have evaluated over 150 players in total. This process includes me grading a minimum of three games for each prospect before coming up with my opinions/grades.
More often than not, I would watch at least five or six contests for each prospect before doing an evaluation. Unfortunately, there were some cases where I had trouble getting certain all-22 tapes, so I had to make do.
The way this works is I would evaluate each game I watched individually, and then I averaged those grades into one final film grade worth a total of 20 points.
Example: blue-chip prospects (90 percent or higher) received anywhere from 18-20 points in all likelihood.
Game tape is the only criterion that is worth 20 points on my grading scale, while other areas, such as analytics, athletic score, ceiling/floor, etc., are worth a maximum of 10 points.
Now that all that has been covered, let’s see which edge rushers from this talented class are the true cream of the crop.