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How good a pass rusher is Abdul Carter?
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- How good a pass rusher is Abdul Carter?
Since Joe Schoen arrived as New York Giants general manager, these have been his first-round picks: Kayvon Thibodeaux, Evan Neal, Deonte Banks, Malik Nabers, Abdul Carter, Jaxson Dart, Arvell Reese, and Sisi Mauigoa. Neal was a huge miss. Thibodeaux hasn't been as good as you hope a No. 5 pick will be, but he plays an important, though unglamorous role oftentimes in the Giants defense.Mauigoa has gone through an adjustment period but played well against Houston. Banks looked like a flameout, but under Dennard Wilson he's playing like a Pro Bowler. Nabers is now looking like his next Pro Bowl selection is on the horizon. Reese has been everything you could hope for so far. So has Dart, even though imported first-rounder J.J. McCarthy is looking like he could give Dart a run for his money.
That leaves Carter. What shall we make of him? On the one hand, we consistently see him getting into the backfield on his pass rush. On the other hand, we rarely see him actually getting to the quarterback for a sack.
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Is the perplexing Carter a success or a failure? Edge defenders have multiple jobs, including run defense, sometimes coverage, and sometimes eating blocks so another edge defender can get to the passer. You draft a player No. 3, though, to sack or at least disrupt the quarterback, so let's focus on that Job 1 of an edge defender.
Sacking the quarterback is a drama in three acts:
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You have to first beat the block of the offensive lineman opposite you who is protecting the quarterback. In football metric language, this is called a pass rush "win." A win is not the same as a pressure, because…
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You have to get close enough to the quarterback for you to affect his throw. That's not the same thing as Act 1, because the QB may be lined up in the shotgun far behind the line of scrimmage, or he is rolling out to the side opposite the one the edge defender is coming from, or the play is a quick pass to the flat, etc. Only if you get close enough to make the QB get rid of the ball sooner than he wants or affect his throw in some other way do you get credit for a pressure.
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You have to hit the quarterback soon enough and hard enough to tackle him before he can get rid of the ball. Otherwise it counts as a QB hit but not a sack.
So how good is Carter at all these things?
Pro Football Focus thinks he is pretty darn good. In his rookie season, PFF gave him an 84.5 pass rush grade, which was 11th among all NFL edge defenders. The guys ahead of him were all the players who immediately come to mind as the NFL's best pass rushers: Myles Garrett, Micah Parsons, Will Anderson Jr., Aidan Hutchinson, etc. But now it's 2026, so how's he doin' this year?
No. 4 in the NFL ain't bad. But it gets better. PFF defines a subset of all pass rush snaps as " True Pass Sets ." These throw out plays like screen passes, rollouts, and play-action passes that distort the impression of how well the edge defender is doing mano-a-mano against his blocker and the quarterback he is trying to get to. Here are the 2026 rankings of edge defenders for only true pass set plays:
The far right column shows the pass rush grade for true pass sets only, and Carter is No. 1 in the NFL.
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We can go further. The NFL embeds RFID tags in players' shoulder pads, so they have a pretty good idea of if and exactly how quickly an edge rusher beats his man. Here are the rankings as of Oct. 20 from ESPN Analytics :
Carter is actually tied for the No. 1 edge rusher in the NFL in pass rush win rate (i.e., beating his blocker). He's being double-teamed (DT%) at a slightly higher rate than others in the top 5 but a rate that is typical of the top 20 overall.
So beating his man is not the problem. Getting to the quarterback in time after he beats his man is the problem. But it may not be his problem. Here is a thread from Ben Linsey of Sumer Sports on the topic:
You can see Carter right up there with the big guys in pass rush wins, but the pressures and sacks are much lower than the others. The pass rush wins, though, are having an impact:
The EPA per play for the defense as a whole on plays where Carter beats his man is three times more negative (a good thing for a defense) than the EPA per play on wins for the typical pass rusher, i.e., even though Carter himself is not getting to the quarterback as much as he'd like, he's (apparently, my interpretation) forcing the QB to make a quicker decision than he wants to get rid of the ball to avoid the sack.
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That's because he's winning against his blocker so quickly:
So Carter may not have the numbers himself but the defense as a whole is benefiting. The good news beyond that is that if Carter is like other edge rushers, the best may be yet to come:
If all of this is not just a coincidence, then apparently it means that opposing offenses are very aware of how quickly Carter is winning, it is forcing them to get the ball out more quickly, and it is hurting their ability to be successful on those passes, whether it be because they have to focus on shallower pass routes that develop quickly and produce less EPA, or they are just hurrying and less accurate with their throws.
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Either way, Carter seems to be in the heads of opposing defensive coordinators, and if the stats above are meaningful, we might expect his visible impact to increase in the second half of the season.
