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 offensive line draft class boasts plenty of high-end talent. Notre Dame’s Joe Alt and Oregon State’s Taliese Fuaga are among the headliners, though top interior players like Oregon’s Jackson Powers-Johnson are also being selected in the first round of mock drafts.
With 12 offensive linemen in the top 50 of PFF’s big board, it’s an excellent year to need offensive line help.
Let's look at West Virginia‘s Zach Frazier, who played 3,071 snaps in his college career and finished all three of his seasons with a PFF grade of 78.0 or higher.
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SCOUTING SUMMARY
Frazier has the perfect background for an interior offensive lineman, as he was a four-time state wrestling champion in high school. That built-in core strength is a massive boon to his work on the interior.
His body control and forearm/grip strength allow him to latch on to defenders. His flexibility is impressive, and he can get low to consistently win with leverage at the snap, even on quarterback sneaks. His arms are short, which is OK for a center, but he will lose cross-face reps against longer defensive linemen.
He won't blow you up with power at contact, but he does have the weight, power and technique to anchor well in pass protection.
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 FRAZIER RANKS IN THE STABLE METRICS
The PFF pass-blocking grade does a fine job of describing an offensive lineman’s success as a pass-blocker, but it becomes even more stable when isolated to just “true pass sets.”
True pass sets are plays without play-action, screens and designed rollouts where there are at least four pass-rushers and the quarterback stands in the pocket for at least 2.1 seconds. Isolating more specific situations helps us project a lineman’s future pass-blocking performance.
Run blocking is generally a stable measure of play. However, negatively graded plays are more stable for offensive tackles, while positively graded plays tend to fluctuate. The opposite is true for guards and centers on the interior.
Frazier improved as a pass-blocker throughout his career and falls in the 51st percentile in pass-blocking grade since 2022. While that’s still not ideal, his size and strength could indicate that there’s even more room for improvement.
The West Virginia center has a 9.7% positively graded play rate and a 6.8% negatively graded play rate on man/gap runs. His 82.3 run-blocking grade on such plays ranks 13th since 2020.
BOTTOM LINE FROM PFF's 2024 NFL DRAFT GUIDE
Frazier's background and build give him a high floor as a scheme-versatile center worthy of an early Day 2 pick and a starting role.
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