Nfl Draft 2026: Finding Playmaking Pass Rushers For The Dallas Cowboys

MIAMI GARDENS, FLORIDA - JANUARY 19: Akheem Mesidor #3 of the Miami Hurricanes looks on during the first half of the College Football Playoff National Championship between the Indiana Hoosiers and the Miami Hurricanes at Hard Rock Stadium on January 19, 2026 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by CFP/Getty Images) | Getty Images

In 2025, the Cowboys ranked 26th overall with just 35 sacks, which must count as a huge disappointment, even when taking the Micah Parsons trade into account. After all, the Cowboys invested three of their last four second-round picks in pass rushers and signed Jadeveon Clowney and Dante Fowler on top of that, never mind beefing up the interior defensive line with Kenny Clark and Quinnen Williams.

As such, it’s not a big reach to assume the Cowboys could be looking for pass rushers early in the 2026 draft.

Since 2011, we’ve intermittently used a metric called the ‘Production Ratio’ to assess who the potential playmakers in the draft might be. The Production Ratio alerted us early to the likes of Kawann Short in 2013 or Aaron Donald in 2014.

The Production Ratio was initially proposed by NFL.com’s Pat Kirwan, and is really a very simple metric that adds up sacks and tackles-for-loss and divides the sum by the number of college games played. The resulting ratio is one tool among many – albeit a pretty good one – that measures the playmaking potential of front four players coming out of college. The Production Ratio is calculated as follows:

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PRODUCTION RATIO = (SACKS + TACKLES FOR LOSS) / NUMBER OF GAMES PLAYED

The ratio is usually calculated over the entire college career of a prospect, but that method can be inaccurate because not every prospect has a four-year career in college. To correct for that, we’ll only look at the last two seasons of a player’s college career. For the two-year measure, a number above 1.5 is often indicative of premier talent for a pass rusher, a value above 2.0 can be indicative of elite talent.

But before we look at the defensive ends in the 2026 draft class, let’s first talk about expectations. If you haven’t yet, odds are you’ll soon read a draft profile in which some writer with a limited understanding of how the NFL works will tout some edge rusher as having “double-digit sack potential.” That term is liberally thrown around in the lead-up to the draft, but just because it’s an over-used term doesn’t make it true. But it does reflect the unrealistic expectations many fans have about pass rushers in the draft.

Why? Because double-digit sack players are exceedingly rare. Of all the edge rushers drafted in the nine drafts between 2017 and 2025, only seven have managed to average 10 or more sacks per year. The table below shows the top pass rushers drafted between 2017 and 2025 and includes each player’s Production Ratio.

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Year	Rnd (Pick)	Team	Player	Pos	Total Sacks	Sacks per Year	Production Ratio
2017	1 (1)	CLE	Myles Garrett	DE	125.5	13.9	2.31
2021	1 (12)	DAL	Micah Parsons	DE	65	13.0	0.98
2017	1 (30)	PIT	T.J. Watt	OLB	115	12.8	1.06
2022	1 (2)	DET	Aidan Hutchinson	DE	43	10.8	1.79
2025	1 (26)	ATL	James Pearce	DE	10.5	10.5	1.73
2019	1 (16)	CAR	Brian Burns	DE	71	10.1	1.74
2023	1 (3)	HOU	Will Anderson	DE	30	10.0	2.82
2019	4 (106)	OAK	Maxx Crosby	DE	69.5	9.9	2.25
2022	2 (64)	DEN	Nik Bonitto	OLB	37	9.3	1.84
2019	1 (2)	SFO	Nick Bosa	DE	64.5	9.2	2.03
2023	3 (77)	LAR	Byron Young	OLB	27.5	9.2	1.50
2017	3 (103)	NOR	Trey Hendrickson	DE	81	9.0	2.21
2019	1 (7)	JAX	Josh Hines-Allen	LB	61	8.7	2.12
2023	2 (54)	LAC	Tuli Tuipulotu	OLB	26	8.7	1.87
2019	1 (26)	WAS	Montez Sweat	DE	57	8.1	1.98

As usual, the mandatory caveat that applies to any stat-based assessment: There are a multitude of factors that determine how well a prospect will do in the NFL. College production is just one of them.

With two exceptions, all players in the table above have remarkably high production ratios over their last two college years. But not every successful NFL pass rusher necessarily had prolific college production, as we can see here with Micah Parsons and and T.J. Watt. In Parsons’ case, he mostly played as an off-the-ball linebacker at Penn State, thus limiting his overall pass rush production. In Watt’s case, even the reduced two-year measure doesn’t do him justice. Watt went from almost no production in his sophomore season to a standout junior season with a one-season Production Ratio of 1.93.

But while almost all of the most successful pass rushers of the last nine years all had high Production Ratios, it doesn’t mean that a high Production Ratio automatically translates to high NFL production. The Cowboys now this all too well: Taco Charlton had a “green” Production Ratio of 1.59 but never amounted to anything in the NFL.

Also note that the best pass rushers tend to be picked early in the draft, though getting picked early is also no guarantee of NFL success. There are exceptions like Maxx Crosby, where the level of competition at Eastern Michigan and his “gangly/thin” frame likely influenced his draft stock, or Trey Hendrickson, who had “almost zero experience playing against tackles with NFL futures” at Florida Atlantic.

The Production Ratio, like every other stat-based projection tool, is not going to be a perfect predictor of how successful college players are going to be in the NFL. But it does give you something to think about as you evaluate these players and their potential, and it may be one building block in identifying who this year’s playmakers will be – and who won’t. The NFL combine will provide us with even more metrics, giving us an even bigger data base from which to assess players, and we’ll look at those in due time, but today we’re talking Production Ratio.

2026 Edge Rusher Prospects

The tables below show the 16 potential edge rushers that currently rank in the T0p 101 on Consensus Big Board at NFLmockdraftdatabase.com along with each player’s Production Ratio.

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Consensus rank	Player	School	Height	Weight	Sacks	TFL	Games	Prod. Ratio
3	Rueben Bain	Miami (FL)	6030	270	20.5	33.5	38	1.42
8	David Bailey	Texas Tech	6030	250	21.5	27.5	26	1.88
13	Keldric Faulk	Auburn	6060	285	9.0	16.0	24	1.04
22	Cashius Howell	Texas A&M	6020	248	15.5	22.5	26	1.46
28	T.J. Parker	Clemson	6030	260	16.0	29.0	26	1.73
30	Akheem Mesidor	Miami (FL)	6030	265	18.0	26.5	28	1.59
40	R Mason Thomas	Oklahoma	6020	249	15.5	22.0	23	1.63
45	Romello Height	Texas Tech	6030	240	12.5	18.0	26	1.17
50	Zion Young	Missouri	6050	262	9.0	22.0	26	1.19
54	L.T. Overton	Alabama	6050	278	6.0	9.0	26	0.58
58	Joshua Josephs	Tennessee	6030	240	5.5	15.0	24	0.85
69	Gabe Jacas	Illinois	6030	270	19.0	26.5	25	1.82
77	Dani Dennis-Sutton	Penn State	6050	265	17.0	25.0	29	1.45
81	Derrick Moore	Michigan	6030	260	14.0	16.5	24	1.27
100	Malachi Lawrence	UCF	6040	260	12.0	17.0	23	1.26
101	Anthony Lucas	USC	6050	285	3.0	3.5	19	0.34

Overall, the 2026 edge rusher class looks relatively weak from a Production Ratio point of view. I can’t remember a draft class that didn’t have a single “blue” prospect with a score of 2.0 or higher. However, five guys show guys show up as “green”: David Bailey at the top of the draft is likely out of reach for the Cowboys, but there are three prospects bundled at the bottom of the first round (T.J. Parker, Akheem Mesidor, and R Mason Thomas) that could be interesting for the Cowboys. Which one of the three would best fit in Dallas will likely be something we’ll debate until the Cowboys’ picks are in, and very likely even beyond that.

John Owning, somewhat of the resident pass rush expert in Cowboys Nation and soon-to-return writer for PFF.com, has already picked Mesidor as his favorite among the three, with R Mason Thomas not far behind, and ranks both of them higher than the consensus board does.

As we saw in the case of T.J. Watt described above, we may have to acknowledge that dogmatically sticking to the tw0-year time frame for the Production Ratio may not do every prospect justice, so here are the five players whose production ratio improves the most when only looking at their final year in college:

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Consensus rank	Player	School	Height	Weight	2-year Prod. Ratio	1-year Prod. Ratio
8	David Bailey	Texas Tech	6030	250	1.88	2.43
22	Cashius Howell	Texas A&M	6020	248	1.46	1.96
30	Akheem Mesidor	Miami (FL)	6030	265	1.59	2.00
50	Zion Young	Missouri	6050	262	1.19	1.77
69	Gabe Jacas	Illinois	6030	270	1.82	2.04

So we do get some “blue” prospects in this draft after all, but teams will need to understand what drove the jump in production for each player and what that means for their NFL future.

My early favorites are Akheem Mesidor and R Mason Thomas, although that could easily change as we get deeper into draft season and add NFL combine data to the picture.

What the Cowboys need to do is figure out which of the many prospects available can be the most productive in the Cowboys’ scheme, and that may be an entirely different question than whether a guy was highly productive in college or can run a fast 40-yard dash.

And finally, just for reference, here are the pass rushers the Cowboys have drafted in the first two rounds since 2005.

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Year	Round (Pick)	Player	School	Sacks	TFL	Games	2-year Prod. Ratio
2005	1 (11)	DeMarcus Ware	Troy	28.0	57.0	44	2.15
2007	1 (26)	Anthony Spencer	Purdue	21.0	44.0	47	1.90
2014	2 (34)	DeMarcus Lawrence	Boise State	19.0	34.0	23	2.30
2015	2 (60)	Randy Gregory	Nebraska	16.5	25.5	24	1.75
2017	1 (28)	Taco Charlton	Michigan	18.5	27.5	38	1.52
2021	1 (12)	Micah Parsons	Penn State	6.5	19.0	26	0.98
2022	2 (56)	Sam Williams	Mississippi	20.5	31.5	35	1.59
2024	2 (56)	Marshawn Kneeland †	Western Michigan	13.0	27.5	37	1.24
2025	2 (44)	Donovan Ezeiruaku	Boston College	30.0	45.5	47	1.82

By chance or by design, almost all pass rushers the Cowboys have taken in the first two rounds have high production ratios in their final two years in college. And that raises an important question about this year’s pass rush class: is there a player available that will upgrade what the Cowboys already have or will it just be more of the same?