Abdul Carter is here to wreck your Sunday

Why Penn State's blurry edge-defender is the top pass-rusher in a deep class

Every now and then, a player comes along who breaks you. You sit, you watch, and all you can do is laugh. We’re talking a get-up-from-the-desk, walk-it-off, stretch-it-out sort of player. You have to run things back 20 times or so, usually blinking, wondering how, for the love of the football Gods, was what you just watched real – or how it even possible. The physics seem impossible, the effect shoulder-shruggingly casual.

Abdul Carter is one of those players. By now, you will have heard all the comparisons between the top edge-rusher in the 2025 class and Micah Parsons. Both played at Penn State. Both wear number eleven. Both were converted off-ball linebackers turned blurry pass-rushers. Both played all over the formation. Both win with first-step quickness and bend. But any comparison to Parsons is unfair. Parsons is the sort of edge-rusher that comes along once in a franchise, an uncommon blend of speed, intellect and power. And yet! If you’re scanning the draft for a player who can nudge up against having a Parsons-like impact, Carter is that guy.

Carter sits in a tier of his own among a deep, talented, edge-rushing class. The high-end talent, in my eyes, isn’t quite as billed. With two weeks to go to the draft, nine edge defenders sit in the top 50 on the consensus big board. By the time the draft rolls around, I’m betting that number cracks eleven. From that group, there is every shape and size of edge-rusher. There are the outside-shoulder swoopers. There are the out-to-in crunchers. There are the in-out, flex pieces. There are a handful of marauding, stand-up, beat-you-with-quicks artists. There is one legitimate savant, Boston College’s Donovan Ezeiruaku. But there is only one Abdul Carter: an honest-to-goodness gameplan destroyer who can bounce between multiple alignments and end your afternoon in 2.5 seconds.

Carter is coming to wreck your Sunday. There are knocks to be found (more on those later), potentially glaring weaknesses. But the upside with Carter is a roaming defensive chess piece who can toggle across the formation, overwhelm blockers one-on-one, and be the center-piece of a springy pass-rushing group. In a class lacking blue-chip talent, it’s hard not to see how he’s not the second most valuable player on the board behind Travis Hunter.

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Carter is a blurry athlete. He moves differently. Scouts love to call it ‘kissing the grass’, those players who seem to skip across the field rather than plant-and-drive off the turf. As a pass-rusher, he can fit four moves in where others can only find one. There are the prods, the bobs, the weaves, subtle acts of cruelty that play off his initial hops. He has unusual body control and can contort and shift his weight while maintaining speed and power throughout his rush. Given the springs, the leaning, the bobbing, the knifing, the attack mentality, it’s tough for blockers to keep up. Do they jump out early, try to set the terms of engagement, and get beat to their set point? How about holding back, waiting to win the handfight? Neither has proven to be a good option. Once engaged in the rusher, Carter is frenetic, often to the point of being out of control. He’s all hands and churning legs and maintains his burst no matter how far he is forced to sink or alter the angle of his rush plan.

Everything begins with Carter’s first-step explosiveness. And that, dear reader, can be truly frightening. There are torqued-up rushers – and then there is the likes of Carter.

That explosivity is maintained throughout the rush. Some pass-rushers are quick off the ball and tight at the top of the arc, or they lack the short-area burst to be able to cut across a lineman’s faces, allowing them to be a true three-way rusher (outside, inside, through the blocker).

Carter is different. He is quick off the ball. He is quick once engaged. Most importantly, he accelerates off contact, the number one trait for those who turn would-be pressures into game-changing sacks at the pro level. He has juice in close quarters, comfortable modulating his tempo to get linemen off balance or forcing them to commit before revving to top speed to seal the deal.

Pair that off-the-ball juice with the ability to sink and corner and you have found yourself a true dip-and-rip phenom.

The threat of that outside burst forces tackles to commit early in the rep – as in, the first instant after the snap. They want to get wide to cut off his angle. They want to get deep, careful of being beat out of their cleats. But his lower body flexion allows Carter to knife back inside, bursting through the gate left void by opposing tackles. It is, yes, vintage Parsons, bullying away with an outside move before before slamming back inside to tilt a game. Carter registered a pressure on 30.9% of his inside moves, clocking up a pass-rush win rate of *falls out of chair* 66.2% (!!!) when attacking inside. SIXTY-SIX PERCENT. Holy smokes.

The tape backs up the numbers. And Carter improved in layering his rushes as the season progressed. Early on, he was all burst and no finesse. He had little feel for getting tackles off balance, winning because he was so damn quicker than everyone off the ball. He hammered that outside shoulder, no matter where he was moved around the formation. But later in the year, as his pass-rushing radar came online, he started to figure out how to tempo and time his rush. He would modulate speeds, fist zipping upfield before jabbing his lead foot inside. Sometimes, he was really going, trying to slice across a tackle’s face before they could react. Other times, it was a fake out, the jab leading the tackle to narrow their feet as they tried to close off the inside door, with Carter then flying past the outside shoulder, the tackle caught off balance.

By the time the fourth quarter rolled around, Carter could fly home with any move he wanted. When digging through edge-rushers who can be impact players at the next level, it’s important to track their fourth-quarter pass-rush. One trick ponies are found out. Do they have the stamina to keep launching themselves into a brick wall? Do they continue to bring an electric jolt off the snap? Do they have a plan? Have they laid the foundations early in the game to be the reason their defense gets over the line?

Carter checks the boxes. Penn State were way ahead in several 2024 games by the time the fourth quarter rolled around. But in close-ish two-score games, Carter’s fourth-quarter rates were enough to make even the most sanguine weak at the knees. He finished with 23% pressure rate in fourth-quarters, notching a 26% pass-rush win rate, 16 total pressures and three sacks.

That was all a part of his development in moving from off the ball to a full-time edge-rushing role. And as he added up the reps, he began to add moves on top of moves, too. Carter may not be the most sophisticated player with all his go-to techniques, but his growth in all aspects of the rush (and his plan) was real. There were outside rips, clubs, two hand chops, ghost rushes, a lethal batch of spin moves, and fakes built into each.

There is more to come. Some of the sequencing is iffy. And his pass rush radar (where he relates to the quarterback) is a couple of ticks below the top pass rushers that have entered the league in recent years. Sometimes, he’s too giddy, unwilling to modulate his rush tempo to open up easier opportunities. He wants to get on top of the tackle and win the rep NOW – this second – maybe last second!

In the abstract, an all-out speed-rusher sounds good. Surely, you want those guys flying at full throttle. But the best speed-rushers blend that initial step with one of two things: converting speed-to-power or layering their rushes so that when they hit the accelerator, they know they have the best chance to get home. That combination of acceleration and deceleration allows an athlete to be slippery – and a slippery edge-rusher with first-step burst typically becomes a super-duper star.

Flashes of patience are in there, usually when mugged up along the interior. He baits cement-footed linemen. Good ahead. You commit. Good luck keeping up once you do.

Carter has not fully refined either element – yet. Oftentimes, he is too antsy to close the distance, losing his feet and natural pass-rushing line. He is so explosive that he can leap into bad positions and then struggle to recover the rush. Watch Parsons, and you see a speed-rusher at the peak of his powers: leaping upfield, slowing for a fateful half-second, swerving one way, and then booms go the dynamite as he rips through the insider corridor.

The power moves are a work-in-progress for Carter, too. Does he have knockback power? No. Can he detonate the pocket on his own? Not yet. But he is a willing thumper, happy to mash away inside on stunts and twists rather than bailing out and waiting for his turn as a one-on-one guy heading up the arc. Carter recognized that teams were tilting their protection to wherever he aligned and was happy to play the role of defensive chess piece, drawing a double that could spring a teammate to fly home to the quarterback. Early in his pro career, that should be enough.

But that is where the comparisons to Parsons fall apart. Parsons is a true speed-to-power bulldozer. He unsettles blockers with his speed up the arc, coupled with the potential that he will knife to the inside shoulder. But, lingering under the surface, his straight-ahead power move. Parsons is not Trey Hendrickson, but he rocks fools, forces them back in their stance, and then goes and hunts with his speed moves. Parsons can – scratch that, wants – to run through a blocker's chest. Those four or five or fifteen reps of a commitment to power force blockers back on their feet, or ask them to close the distance early so that Parsons cannot build up a head of steam. At that point, it’s curtains. That’s when the speed outside arrives; it’s when the cross-face attacks hit.

Carter is not that guy. Some of it is a lack of technical refinement and polish. Carter can be frenetic with his hands. His feet and hands are not always in sync, robbing him of some power at the point of attack. Why does that matter? Because it makes a pass-rusher inefficient. It adds extra steps to their rush. It saps an edge-defender of the pop needed at the point of attack. It can make a rusher unbalanced, making it harder to hit a lineman with the necessary move – or to set up one way before swooping the other.

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