I would not say I’m a particularly sophisticated NFL Draft analyst. I do a lot of work on it every year, but it feels like rather than learning anything, all I end up doing is teaching myself how little I actually know.
Maybe that’s a good thing in its own way, but it’s frustrating. I’d like to come out of my process of compiling data and sorting through it over the course of hours and days and weeks feeling like I know more at the end than I did at the beginning, but I rarely do.
That’s especially true on defense, where most of a player’s job is ensuring that something doesn’t happen. How do you measure something that doesn’t happen? You are, by definition, looking for something that doesn’t exist.
On top of that, defensive football is inherently reactive. There are examples of defensive players enforcing their will on the offense, but they are few, and by their limited number they demonstrate the fundamental truth of defense: they’re always playing catch up.
At an individual play level, the defense has to wait to see what the offense is doing before they can move, and at the schematic level, the defense is constantly trying to implement counter moves for the latest offensive trends.
Having grown up in a certain era of football, it’s sometimes hard to recognize these counter moves, because a lot of them involve football looking different than I’m used to. You grow accustomed to certain positions being played certain ways by certain types of players, and it’s hard to square the schematic evolution of the game with what I’ve seen over the course of 20 to 30 years of watching football.
That’s a five paragraph scenic route to this point: I think Anthony Hill Jr. out of Texas is probably a very good linebacker, even if I struggle to see it.
My struggle starts with the prodigious output of Lance Zerlein, a draft analyst for NFL.com. He bestowed a heady comparison on Hill, saying his NFL projection was none other than Bobby Wagner, a tackling machine who, though he’s been in decline for some time, is probably headed for the Pro Football Hall of Fame one day. Looking at any draft prospect and coming to the conclusion that he looks like a 10-time Pro Bowl, six-time All-Pro, Super Bowl champion future resident of Canton, Ohio is a tough pill to swallow, especially when I can’t quite wrap my brain around Hill as a prospect.
Hill is certainly an accomplished linebacker; a true junior declaration for the NFL Draft, he nonetheless started 32 of his 40 career games for Texas, earning numerous national and conference awards during his time as a Longhorn. He accomplished about as much as one could expect in a three-year college career.
Look no further than one stat we use to evaluate linebacker play: ballhawks. Ballhawks are plays on the ball: sacks, tackles for loss, interceptions, passes defensed, and fumbles forced. The more you make, the better, and in just 40 college games, Hill racked up 51.5 ballhawks. Out of 22 linebackers I studied in this year’s class, only two averaged more plays on the ball per game than Hill, and one of them played 15 fewer games.
But my problem, ultimately, is this: he doesn’t look like my brain says a linebacker should.
Hill is 6-foot-2 and weighs 238 pounds. As a football fan who cut his teeth in the late 90s and early 2000s, that’s not what my mind wants to say a linebacker should look like. A linebacker should be a 250-pound mauler, a Rottweiler in shoulder pads who squares up with fullbacks in the A-gap, stacks and sheds, and then rips down whichever running back thought he was going to saunter through the middle of the defense.
But that player, if he ever really existed, is gone. He’s extinct. A dinosaur now turning into oil deep beneath the permafrost of NFL history, right there with the fullback he used to battle.
Hill is what a modern linebacker looks like. Swift and sleek (he ran the 40 in 4.52 seconds, putting up a speed score equal to or better than most of the wide receivers in this year’s class when you account for weight), he’s built for running with tight ends or ranging sideline to sideline to track down running backs leaking out of the backfield. He’s well suited to the rigors of modern football because he seems to have been purpose built to attack them.
The problem with Hill as a prospect isn’t him. It’s me. It’s a perspective blinkered by history, one I must constantly challenge lest I miss out on the developments of the modern game and the prospects preparing to implement them.
Hill is one such prospect. And for what it’s worth, Bobby Wagner is a bit undersized, too. He once had to battle the same kind of perception I’m trying to fight with Hill. It turned out pretty well for him. Maybe the comparison isn’t so far off after all.