I watched Kendrick Faulk’s 2024 games against Alabama and Texas A&M. These were 2024 games (the video I watched was posted in June 2025). I wanted to see how he held up against real NFL-caliber offensive lines, and both of those teams had multiple future pros across the front.
Pass Rush: There’s just not many moves in the bag right now. That can be fine if you’re elite at one or two moves, but Faulk was underwhelming in these two games. I saw maybe two legitimately good pass rush reps, and both came from the interior. His foundation is speed to power, with some occasional hand swats mixed in. The problem is the speed to power isn’t good enough yet to anchor the profile. Sometimes he pushes the pocket. Other times he gets completely stonewalled. I didn’t see a single snap where he put an offensive lineman on roller skates. Given his size and physical profile, I expected more displacement — consistent pocket push with at least a few dominant reps. Instead, it felt like he pushed the pocket about a third of the time and did nothing the other two-thirds. There’s not much bend. To be fair, I don’t think he even tried to win with pure cornering speed in these games, which suggests that ankle and hip flexibility probably aren’t strengths. His lateral quickness is fine but nothing special — nowhere near someone like Mesidor — and I didn’t see real inside counters. More importantly, he doesn’t have a pass rush plan. Even when he does push the pocket, there’s no secondary move to convert that push into a sack. No rip to clear, no consistent club-swim to disengage. The whole plan seems to be “push the pocket,” and right now he’s only average at that. The only snap where I remember him getting a pressure on from the edge was one against Texas A&M where he was in teh 5 technique and got free on a twist, but the QB kind of broke out the pocket to his right so it felt more like a concidence that the QB happened to be escaping the pocket towards him. He also had one nice rip against Texas A&M to win the inside against the O-Lineman but then was too stiff to turn the corner and make a play.
Why isn’t the speed to power more effective? Part of it is pad level. He’s tall and can get high. His hands can shoot too high as well — I saw him hit offensive linemen in the helmet a couple of times. That kills leverage and power transfer. He’s not so bad that there’s no path forward. If he improves the speed to power — say he goes from pushing the pocket one-third of the time to two-thirds — and then layers in a legitimate plan off of that (club, rip, inside counter), there’s a developmental arc. But right now, it’s a lot of projection.
Run Defense: He is very good against the run. He usually has good pop in his hands--though he is not always consistent with his hand pop. He can stack, peek, and shed. He played double teams from the 4i and made plays. Across the two games, he had around five or six flashy run-defense reps where he not only executed his assignment but actually finished the play himself. One thing that stood out was how twitchy he can be against outside zone. You forget about his explosiveness, and then he suddenly knifes through the line and makes a stop in the backfield. His length is a real asset here. While his height can hurt him as a pass rusher, it helps in the run game when he’s stacking and controlling blocks. He absolutely looks capable of two-gapping. If his ankle and hip bend seem limited as a rusher, he does show good knee bend as a run defender — though it’s not always consistent. When he fatigues, his pad level rises. On longer drives, you can see his stamina drop off a bit, and his leverage slips from good to a little high. That’s really the main weakness in his run defense — consistency of pad level late in drives.
Overall: He is a really good run defender and would improve a defense on early downs immediately. But as a pass rusher, everything is projection. His foundation is speed to power, and that foundation isn’t even good yet. Even if it becomes good, he still needs to build a real rush plan to convert push into pressure and sacks. Right now, he’s more of a cleanup player than a true difference-maker as a rusher. I don’t think he’s worth the #7 overall pick. I wouldn’t want him in the teens either. If there were a larger trade back into the 20s, that’s where I’d start to get interested. I didn’t study Mykel Williams or Travon Walker closely when they came out, but this profile feels similar: a strong run defender on Day 1 with a speed-to-power foundation that you can imagine becoming something more — but not particularly close yet. It would be interesting to see his 2025 tape and whether there was real growth in the pass rush department. Because based on these 2024 games, the run defense is ready, but the pass rush is still very much a work in progress. His postion verstiality was impressive, I saw him as 1 technique, 3 technique, 4i, 5 technique, 7 technique, and even 9 technique. The problem was, regardless of where he played he was always a pretty good run defender and tepid pass rusher.
 }})
