This offseason, we’re hoping to write up prospect profiles on every single draftable player that the Green Bay Packers bring in on a pre-draft visit. The third potential first-round defensive end on our list is Georgia’s Mykel Williams, who battled through a Grade 2 ankle sprain during the 2024 season.
According to Williams, he was injured in the Bulldogs’ first game of the year, which limited to him to about 60 percent. Even though he ran a 40-yard dash in the 4.75-second to 4.82-second range at his pro day, Williams will have another private workout for teams on April 18th, along with his teammate Jalon Walker, a sign that he’s still recovering from that ankle injury.
So, instead of just looking at one year of film for Williams’ scouting report, I went through both his 2024 and 2023 seasons to better understand what type of an athlete he was before the injury. While his 2023 film did sort out some of the athletic questions about Williams, there were still some aspects of his scouting report that fell short of a surefire top-10 selection.
Mykel Williams Scouting Report
Only 20 years old, Williams won’t be able to drink legally in the United States until late June. The former five-star recruit came in with high expectations when he joined the Georgia Bulldogs, which he met by earning back-to-back second-team All-SEC honors over the last two seasons. According to On3’s industry rankings, Williams was viewed as the sixth-best recruit in the 2022 high school class, only behind Walter Nolen, Travis Hunter, Luther Burden, Sonny Styles and Domani Jackson, one spot ahead of Shemar Stewart, who the Packers also brought in on a visit.
Georgia essentially used Williams as their replacement for Travon Walker, who went first overall in the 2022 NFL Draft. Like Walker, Williams often played inside the offensive tackle in a 4i technique rather than truly playing the edge. This limited his pass-rushing production. Here’s the good news: Walker also had very poor production in the passing game and is coming off of back-to-back seasons where he registered double-digit sacks for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
According to YouTuber Brett Krollman, Williams is actually one of the few defensive end prospects who produced less in “true pass sets” than Stewart in this class. If you’re a big pass rush win rate guy, then Williams isn’t going to be the player that you’re going to be banging the table for on draft day.
If you want to get a feel for how Williams was played at Georgia, below is a video with several All-22 clips of Williams’ reps against the Texas Longhorns, where he played against two future NFL tackles.
At 6’5” and 260 pounds, Williams certainly has the frame to play defensive end at the NFL level. According to Mockdraftable, he has 81st percentile arm length and an 86th percentile wingspan for edge defenders, which is apparent as soon as you turn on the tape.
Run defense is going to be Williams’ calling card early on in his NFL career. He’s a tough player, which is why he stuck as a 4i for Georgia and was able to earn those All-SEC honors. He was essentially playing as a defensive tackle who was 40 pounds lighter than the typical bodies at his position against the highest level of college competition. And he succeeded.
He’s going to be able to hold the point of attack. He’s going to do a great job of stacking and shedding. His frame is going to be an asset moving forward. Those are all things you can hang your hat on.
The big question that remains is what he’s going to bring to the table as a pass rusher. He’s more of a quick player than he is a fast player, which means most of his impact is going to be felt earlier on in downs, from an athletic standpoint. His lateral quickness is very good, which is one reason why Georgia often stunted him in their often-edgeless defense that spilled every run to the sideline for rally-and-tackle opportunities.
Unfortunately for Williams, though, that’s not how defense is played at the NFL level, which will limit how many chances he’s going to get to flash that lateral agility. If an edge defender is stunting to an interior gap, that either means that a defensive tackle, a player who typically has the worst foot speed on the defense, will have to run out to play the C- or D-gap or an off-ball linebacker, the smallest player in the box, will have to set an edge against an NFL offensive tackle. Stunting Williams inside will give NFL teams great production as a change-of-pace look, but it’s not something you can do on an every down basis.
So, what does Williams provide on the edge as a pass rusher? Right now, he has a violent spin move that I don’t think he showed nearly enough on film and an inside swim that shortens his path to the quarterback. Those are both counter moves that he can execute well once tackles overset to the outside.
What will force tackles to overset outside? That’s the gap in his scouting report. Right now, he doesn’t really win with speed around the edge or bend. If a team selects Williams, the hope will be that his run defense is good enough that it will warrant him playing as an every-down player, reps that he will hopefully use to improve as an outside edge rusher — a role he hasn’t previously played. For now, he’s a very young, quicker-than-fast run stopper who has a tool box of counter pass rush moves but hasn’t shown the ability to beat tackles on the edge.
He’s going to be a first-round pick, probably in the top 20 selections, off of his potential, but he is a bit of a dice roll because of where his pass-rushing floor is right now. If he can develop a way to beat pass protectors on the outside, though, his upside will leave people wondering why he wasn’t taken earlier in the draft after a couple of seasons.