Despite Top Draft Position, Jaguars Must Temper Expectations for Dante Fowler

Jeff Haynes/Associated Press

After the NFL ^[1] draft, we enter this dark, vacant space as a football writing community. With nothing to look forward to in sight, other than veteran optional workouts and rookie minicamps, everyone in arm's reach is tasked with pumping out post-draft grades.

You can go back on forth on the value of these exercises, but they do seem to capture the feeling of individual draft classes from a "hype train" standpoint. One franchise's draft class, the Jacksonville Jaguars ^[2]', stands out specifically in that aspect.

Bucky Brooks of NFL Network ^[3], Steve Palazzolo of Pro Football Focus ^[4], Mel Kiper Jr. of ESPN.com ^[5], Chris Burke of Sports Illustrated ^[6] and Lindsay H. Jones of USA Today ^[7], among others, all gave the Jaguars an A- or A-plus-grade for their draft class.

Round	Selection	Position	Player	School
1	5	DB	Jalen Ramsey	Florida State
2	36	LB	Myles Jack	UCLA
3	69	EDGE	Yannick Ngakoue	Maryland
4	103	DL	Sheldon Day	Notre Dame
6	181	EDGE	Tyrone Holmes	Montana
6	201	QB	Brandon Allen	Arkansas
7	226	DL	Jonathan Woodard	Central Arkansas

Jalen Ramsey and Myles Jack were both considered consensus top-five talents at full health, with opinions scattered around the media that either could have been the most talented prospects in this particular draft class.

Ramsey fell into the lap of Jacksonville when two quarterbacks came off the board back-to-back to start the event, the San Diego Chargers ^[8] shocked the world by drafting hybrid defensive lineman Joey Bosa with the first positional pick of the draft and the Dallas Cowboys ^[9] passed over an impact player at a "premier position" for a chance at catching lightning in a bottle with running back Ezekiel Elliott.

Jack's story on landing in northern Florida is more blunt: His knee might not hold up for a second contract. Despite basically missing all of his true junior season due to a knee injury, he still had his eyes set on the 2016 NFL draft. In early October, right after Jack made it known to the world that he would be leaving school, his head coach at UCLA, Jim Mora, called his decision "risky," per Kevin Gemmell of ESPN.com ^[10].

Still, many assumed that Jack would be a high draft pick, as he was mostly mocked in the top-10 up until the week of the draft, when Jack acknowledged the reality of possible microfracture surgery, a rough procedure, which has stunted young careers across sports, according to the New York Post's Bart Hubbuch.

This quote to me from Myles Jack today about his knee can hardly be comforting to teams. pic.twitter.com/A6BwGYb6lu ^[11]
— Bart Hubbuch (@BartHubbuch) April 27, 2016 ^[12]

Jadeveon Clowney ^[13] of the Houston Texans ^[14], the 2014 first overall pick, was once viewed as a generational talent coming out of South Carolina ^[15]. In two years, due to issues with his knee, which included mircrofracture sur gery, he has 4.5 NFL sacks to his name in 11 starts.

Some will view Jack as a risk-reward balance. On paper, he's a short-term impact player who can play at a high level. For a team which finished 29th in the league in allowed first downs per game defensively, led by defensive guru Gus Bradley, who has a 12-36 record in his three years in Jacksonville, it makes sense as to why this leadership would decide to take a swing at Jack in their current situation.

The other top-200 picks, Maryland edge defender Yannick Ngakoue, Notre Dame defensive lineman Sheldon Day and Montana edge defender Tyrone Holmes, also provide upside to the defense. Ngakoue is a young pass-rusher at 21 years old, Day was a player who many thought was ready for the NFL after the 2014 regular season and Holmes, a freak athlete ^[16], led the FCS in sacks in 2015, not the more touted Noah Spence.

The draft isn't the only reason for channeling excitement around the team, though. They also signed $90 million defensive lineman Malik Jackson, former Pro Bowl safety Tashaun Gipson and former first-round cornerback Prince Amukamara. The Jaguars defense greatly improved this offseason, at least in terms of assets spent and projected impact.

Despite all of these moves, one might think the best addition to their 2016 defense may not come from acquisition, though. The team's 2015 first-round pick, the third overall pick in the draft, is slated to play his first snaps in a Jacksonville jersey this coming year. Defensive end Dante Fowler tore his ACL ^[20] in rookie minicamp last season, which kept him off the field for all of the team's 2015 campaign.

With all of this positive energy, with all of these names coming in at one time, it's hard to be the bearer of bad news, but one angle of this Jaguars redemption story that always hangs me up is that Fowler is going to be some sort of force as a pass-rusher in his first NFL season.

The conversation around this team is that it is going to be their year to breakout, almost because the pressure around the squad is such that it has to be their breakout year for any of those in power positions to survive another season with the franchise.

We live in an era where many in this country have the attention span of a Twitter timeline. The football world often gets sucked into an echo chamber where everything is either absolutely good or absolutely bad. Nuance gets lost and only the loudest, most extreme voices get heard.

During the draft, we heard from ESPN ^[21]'s Ed Werder, NFL.com ^[22]'s Chris Wesseling and even the Senior Bowl ^[23]'s Patrick Woo about the potential of Fowler lining up next to the Jaguars' 2016 class, as if he's a sure-thing to be a 10-sack player. Judging by historical numbers, that's an unfair expectation for both Fowler and Jacksonville fans.

One of the better writers on the internet in terms of being able to gauge where a fanbase is at is Alfie Crow of Big Cat Country, SB Nation's Jaguars site. Just this past week, he made a comment ^[27] about how projecting five to six sacks for Fowler makes him a "hater" in the community.

That got some gears turning and led me to run a short study on players of Fowler's background and their production at his age. For the most part, athletic pass-rushers do better ^[28] in the NFL than non-athletic pass-rushers, on a relative scale.

While that may seem like an easy statement to make, something that should be assumed, the NFL routinely takes players who aren't elite-level athletes at edge-rusher positions in the first round. Fowler is one of them.

While Fowler ran a very fast 40-yard dash coming out of Florida, a 4.60-second mark, which was good for the 94th percentile of defensive ends since 1999, his Mock Draftable spiderweb ^[29] of athleticism outside of the one event the media and fans skew toward is average at best. In fact, his three-cone time, which many would argue is the most important drill in terms of next-level projection at the position, is in the 23rd percentile, even with his "tweener" 261-pound frame.

He ran a 7.40-second time in that drill. For reference, here are the names of players who ran a 7.40 or worse in the three-cone drill between 2005 and 2015 as future first-round pass-rushers, either according to NFL.com ^[30] for the combine or NFLDraftScout.com ^[31] for pro days, if combine times were not available. NFLDraftScout.com has an historical database that runs cleanly through the 2005 draft class.

Shane Ray 7.60-seconds
Quinton Coples 7.57-seconds
Erasmus James 7.56-seconds
Robert Ayers 7.56-seconds
Aaron Maybin 7.56-seconds
Alvin Dupree 7.49-seconds
Marcus Smith 7.48-seconds
Jarvis Jones 7.46-seconds
Dante Fowler 7.40-seconds

There's two ways we can judge Fowler right now, by either age or experience. Heading into this season, he's going to be a 22-year-old. As 22-year-olds, Ray posted four sacks, Coples posted 5.5 sacks, James posted four sacks, Ayers was still in college, Maybin posted zero sacks, Dupree posted four sacks, Smith posted zero sacks and Jones was still in college.

For players of his range of athleticism, excluding those still in school at his current age, their mean was 2.91 sacks for the season they began as 22-year-olds, and the highest sack total was Coples' 5.5 sacks, under the six-sack mark, which allegedly makes Crow a "hater."

If we're judging the group by their sack total in their first year of seeing live NFL snaps, Ray posted four sacks, Coples posted 5.5 sacks, James posted four sacks, Ayers posted zero sacks, Maybin posted zero sacks, Dupree posted four sacks, Smith posted zero sacks and Jones posted one sack. The mean for the group is 2.31 sacks.

That's a sobering reality check. Numbers would suggest that the five- to six-sack mark, which is viewed by some as low-balling Fowler's potential, is more of an unrealistic goal than something to settle for, judging by the average of two to three sacks that Fowler's athletic peers have set for him, with a peak under six sacks for the group as a whole.

Even if you just looked at last year's rookie class, which included Ray, Dupree and Fowler as first-round picks, only two pass-rushers were able to post six or more sacks. They were Preston Smith ^[32], who had 10 pounds on Fowler and ran a 7.07-second three-cone drill, and Danielle Hunter ^[33], who ran a 6.95-second three-cone drill.

While fractions of a second seem ticky-tacky, it's actually drastic. 0.45 seconds doesn't seem like much time at all, but the difference between a 4.40-second 40-yard dash and a 4.85-second 40-yard dash would have the media gasping. However, because there isn't that familiarity with the three-cone, which truly should be the measurement of athleticism for players who have to use ankle flexion and hip flexibility to bend around offensive tackles, this form of athletic assessment is simply overlooked by 99 percent of the football world.

So while there's plenty to be excited about in Jacksonville, their A-grade draft class and wave of free agents coming in defensively, counting on Fowler to be a game-changer in 2016 appears to be out of line, judging by more than a decade of history of pass-rushers who had poor three-cone times, even as high draft picks.