Nolan Smith

Career arc: a quiet rookie year, a year-two breakout that included a Super Bowl, and a 2025 that's gone backwards.

The 2023 rookie year (1.0 sacks in 11 games) was a developmental snap-share campaign — he was the youngest player in the 2023 draft's first round and Philly brought him along slowly. 2024 was the role expansion (6.5 sacks, 11 QB hits) that came through in the playoffs. 2025 is regression: the QB-hit total has held at 11, but sacks have halved and TFLs collapsed from 8 to 1.

The 2024 playoff run: 4.0 sacks, including a 2.0-sack divisional game against Green Bay in his second NFL postseason game ever.

Sacks in three straight playoff games to open his 2024 run — vs Green Bay (2.0), the Rams (1.0), and Washington (1.0) — capped by 2 QB hits on Patrick Mahomes in Super Bowl LIX itself.

The headline: his postseason sack total (4.0) is two-thirds of his entire 2024 regular-season total (6.5) — pressure that arrived in the games that decided rings.

Of his 16 career sacks, 8 came against four opponents — and 5 of those came at home.

He's never had a 2.0-sack regular-season game in his career — the 2.0 vs Green Bay in the 2024 Wild Card round is his single biggest game. 8 of his career sacks are spread across multiple 1.0-sack outings, the profile of a rotational rusher rather than a primary one.

He's done the Super Bowl thing as a sub-7-sack regular-season player — that's vanishingly rare among first-round EDGE picks.

He's the only EDGE in the 2023 first round with a Super Bowl ring. The unusual combination is modest regular-season production (10.5 sacks in 39 games) paired with outsized playoff production (4.0 sacks in 5 games) — his per-game sack rate doubles from 0.27 to 0.80 in the postseason.

The Eagles get him there by design: a rotational EDGE behind Josh Sweat and Bryce Huff in 2024, deployed in nickel sub-rush packages where his speed-around-the-edge profile fits the game-script.

The 2023 first-round EDGE class is thin — Smith's 10.5 career sacks puts him 3rd in the group.

Will Anderson Jr. is the clear hit. Smith's draft slot (#30) was 22 picks behind Anderson, and 17 picks behind Lukas Van Ness — yet he's outproduced Tyree Wilson (#7) and built the only championship case in the group. The 'late-first speed rusher behind a stacked D-line' archetype is what Philadelphia call on, and it's paid back in playoff games.

His 2025 sack rate has collapsed even though he's hitting QBs at the same pace.

Identical QB-hit total (11) in roughly the same games (16 vs 12). What's changed is the conversion: from 1.7 hits per sack in 2024 to 3.7 in 2025. He's getting to the quarterback at the same rate; he just isn't finishing.

This is the cleanest possible 'bad sack luck' signature in the data. Either the 2026 sack total snaps back to 7-8 and the 2025 dip looks like noise, or the finishing problem becomes the next contract discount.