Shemar Stewart: The battle between historic athleticism and poor production
Shemar Stewart is a freak athlete with a poor production profile, making him one of the most intriguing prospects in the 2025 NFL Draft
Shemar Stewart has emerged as one of Draft Twitter’s favorite prospects in the 2025 NFL Draft. Draft gurus adore his freakish combination of size and athleticism, as well as his ability to defend the run. The hype for the 21-year-old edge rusher reached new heights after this year’s NFL combine when he put up possibly the greatest athletic testing measurements we’ve ever seen from an edge rusher in the history of the combine. The dude has physical tools that are truly unprecedented.
Unfortunately, there’s another side to the story here, and Stewart’s profile is not all roses and rainbows. While he has the size and athleticism of a future superstar, his collegiate production leaves a lot to be desired. Draft junkies have argued back and forth about the importance of athleticism and production when it comes to evaluating edge rusher prospects.
Today, I’m going to take a stab at this myself and attempt to evaluate Shemar Stewart by looking at his film, combine numbers, and collegiate production to paint a complete picture of who he is as a prospect.
What the film says
Shemar Stewart’s final season at Texas A&M was by far his best, and his tape was extremely intriguing. One area in which he was truly awesome this past season was defending the run.
There are many reasons why Stewart was so effective against the run this past season. For starters, he is a massive edge rusher, as Texas A&M listed him at 6’6 and 291 lbs. That is an unreal frame for an edge, and this gives him a natural advantage when tasked to shut down run plays.
He’s also extremely powerful, and he does a great job of shedding blocks. It’s hard to overpower him as a run blocker since he’s built like Zeus, and it’s hard to stay connected with him because he has long arms and unreal fluidity, which allows him to evade blocks and get into the backfield.
PFF loved his run defense, giving him a run defense grade of 88.2, the 3rd best mark among power-five edges. Both his stop rate and missed tackle rate were a bit underwhelming, but his grading against the run was exceptional.
While Stewart was amazing as a run defender this past season, his ability to rush the passer was not at the same level. Of course, there are certainly things to like about him as a pass rusher. His get-off is wildly impressive for someone his size, and this allows him to gain an advantage against tackles who aren’t as athletic as him, which is pretty much everyone. He also has great upper body strength, allowing him to win with power, something not every edge rusher can do. This combination of explosiveness and power can be difficult to contain.
Unfortunately, he has some warts in this area of his game. Since he is so massive, he doesn’t have much flexibility, preventing him from being able to bend around tackles like smaller edge rushers can. He also doesn’t have many pass rush moves at the moment, and these two issues make him a bit limited as a pass rusher. He’s simply too one-dimensional at the moment.
Another issue for Stewart is his inability to finish pass rush wins. His film is filled with pressures that should be huge sacks but aren’t because he either falls to the ground or simply isn’t able to bring down the opposing quarterback. I’m not sure how big of a red flag this is, but it’s certainly something to watch out for moving forward.
The greatest athlete ever?
I’ve spent a lot of time praising Shemar Stewart’s athleticism, which pops off the screen when you watch him play. The NFL combine only confirmed his freakish athletic traits when he put together arguably the best performance we’ve ever seen from an edge rusher.
The image above is from a website called Relative Athletic Score. This site measures how combine performances stack up historically by providing percentile rankings for each prospect’s performance in individual drills. It also combines these marks to create one single number, a relative athletic score, which allows us to easily compare combine performances across different eras.
Shemar Stewart’s RAS card is freaking insane. The first thing that pops off to me is his RAS of 10. This means his combine performance in its entirety ranks in the 100th percentile among edge rushers since the combine began. WHEW!
I’m also really impressed by his size. His weight was lower than expected at 267 lbs., but being 6’5 and having 34-inch arms gives him excellent length for the position. On top of having excellent size, he put up elite numbers in terms of explosiveness and speed. A 40-inch vertical, 10’11 broad jump, and 1.58 10-yard split are unbelievable for a 267 lbs. human being. I’m really not sure that Stewart is actually human at this point.
Historically poor production
This has been a pretty positive breakdown of Shemar Stewart up to this point. Unfortunately, that changes now as we’re going to look at his production, both from his entire career and from this past season.
Before I get into the numbers, I want to make it clear what I mean when I talk about production. People who break down film have been critical of people who highlight Stewart’s production, stating that things like sack totals don’t matter when evaluating prospects. I don’t fully disagree with this statement, but sack totals aren’t the only issue with Stewart’s stats. His advanced numbers are also very concerning.
When I talk about production for prospects, I am referring to advanced stats from PFF. This is the kind of data I use to analyze how prospects have performed across their collegiate careers. Some people claim production doesn’t matter for prospects. Those people are mistaken. The correlation between collegiate production and NFL success for edge rusher prospects cannot be ignored. It’s not as strong as it is for other positions like quarterbacks or interior defensive linemen, but it is still fairly strong.
Unfortunately, Shemar Stewart’s career production is historically bad. Across 37 games, he had a PFF grade of 66 (5th percentile) with a pass rush win rate of 11.4% (29th percentile), a pressure rate of 11.6% (32nd percentile), and a stop rate of 3.4% (0th percentile). All of these numbers are well below average for an edge rusher prospect. Also, his PFF grade and stop rate are among the worst marks we’ve seen among edge rusher prospects since 2017.
I have my own analytical prospect model, which includes a production score for each prospect that is created using stats like the ones I mentioned above. Stewart has a production score of just 6.8 (out of 100), making him one of the least productive players of the last 9 years. This may shock you, but that number is far worse than Travon Walker’s production score of 18.5, and Walker was known for having anemic production at Georgia.
One thing that’s worth considering when looking at Stewart’s numbers is the role he played at Texas A&M. He played a ton of snaps either over the tackle or inside the tackle and he was often required to focus on stopping the run, rather than having the freedom to rush the passer while facing one-on-one matchups. This is important context, and this is a good argument for not using raw box score numbers to judge Stewart as a prospect.
However, we can’t completely ignore his production in its entirety. His early seasons at Texas A&M were very shaky, and his production against true pass sets was questionable as he had a PFF pass rush grade of 70.6 (20th percentile) and a pass rush win rate of 20.2 (53rd percentile) in these situations.
He simply wasn’t very productive when looking at his entire body of work, even considering how the system impacted his production. Georgia and Texas A&M are two programs whose defensive scheme makes it harder for its defensive linemen to produce, especially as pass rushers. Let’s see the production scores of defensive line prospects from these two teams over the last few years.
Yikes…that’s concerning. This is why I don’t buy into the idea that Stewart’s production can be ignored simply because of the scheme he played in. This hasn’t kept other prospects in similar situations from producing and it hasn’t limited any of them to the level that his production is at.
I will say that Stewart’s final season at Texas A&M was encouraging, though. I mentioned at the beginning of this article that this was by far his best season. He had a PFF grade of 79.5, and he led the Aggies in pressures. I compared his final season stats to a few other edge rusher prospects who have had production concerns over the years.
Rashan Gary and Danielle Hunter ended up being really good in the NFL, and Shemar Stewart’s numbers line up with theirs on a per-play basis. His pressure rate and pass rush win rates were similar to those guys who ended up being quality starters at the next level.
One area where he struggles in this comparison is market share data. These stats are what percentage of a team’s production in a certain metric did this player contribute to. For example, Texas A&M had 235 total pressures this past season, and Stewart had 39. 39/235 equals 16.6%, meaning Stewart recorded 16.6% of Texas A&M’s pressures. Looking at stats this way allows us to compare how prospects produced in their situations without having to worry about how the scheme skews the data.
Outside of pressures, Stewart wasn’t very productive relative to his own team. The percentage of his team’s tackles, tackles for loss, stops, and sacks he accounted for simply wasn’t very impressive.
Even though I am encouraged by the way Stewart performed last season, I think his overall production profile puts a cap on how good he can be at the next level. We’ve seen players be historically unproductive in college, have good combine performances, and then go on to be solid players in the NFL. Guys like this include Josh Palmer, Greg Newsome II, Nate Hobbs, and Spencer Brown. Of course, none of these players were truly great.
To be fair, Shemar Stewart is a different prospect than these guys. He’s one of the best athletes we’ve ever seen, and he ranks high on the consensus big board. Because of this, my prospect model will be higher on him than the players I listed, but I do think there is good evidence to question just how high Stewart’s ceiling is. Players with this level of production seem not to have very high upside in the NFL.
So…what’s the verdict?
I am absolutely fascinated by Shemar Stewart’s profile. I love his combination of size and athleticism, and I see a gifted player when I watch his film. I can easily see him becoming a dominant run defender who can generate pressures based on what he did this past season, and that is a valuable player worthy of being a first-round pick.
However, I also value career production because it has proven to be a strong indicator of future success, and Stewart falls short in this area. The best edge rusher prospects are the ones who consistently produce for multiple seasons and have elite athleticism (Myles Garrett, Khalil Mack, Nick Bosa, Aidan Hutchinson, etc.). Stewart has the physical tools to be great, but his historically bad production makes it hard to be confident that his traits will allow him to thrive at the next level.
I understand that many people view Shemar Stewart as a top-ten player in the class. I just can’t get there. I could see him becoming a top-ten player in the class if things go right, but I’m not sure the odds of that happening are worth betting on. I view him as a player who might be worth gambling on in the mid to late first round, but even that might be pushing it.
It’s simply rare to see a player be this unproductive and then go on to be great in the NFL. If he does hit, it’s far more likely that he’s simply a decent player rather than a great one. Of course, there’s also a chance that he flames out in the NFL. Whatever the outcome is, I’m excited to see how Shemar Stewart develops and what kind of player he becomes in the future.