Or at least, that's what the minds over at Football Outsiders would say. Their system "Sackseer 2.0" projected only one strong 1st round pass rusher, and a handful of '1st rounders likely to disappoint'. The pass rusher they liked? Nick Perry.

I won't copy and paste their article here (but you should definitely click on through to Football Outsiders and read about their methodology and results yourself). Personally, I find their system quite solid, and even though there are a few outliers, for the most part it has been a very reliable projection system.

A quick word on how to read these stats:

• The overall rating is how a player fared compared to his peers (for example, there are 278 players that have been evaluated with this tool. Player X who has a score of 97.8% would rate 7 out of 278, or that there are only 6 players that are better than him. Player X is in the 97.8 percentile of pass rushers).
• Explosion index uses the player's forty-yard dash, the vertical jump, and the broad jump in pre-draft workouts and creates a composite score with them, weighting them appropriately.
  
• The projected sacks total is through a player's first 5 years in the league.
• Though I didn't include it in this fanpost (more incentive to click through to their site), they also have metrics for Passes Defended per game and Sack Rate per game (which is modified for age and college experiences)

OK, enough stats. Here are the 4 players I thought would be most relevant (they have a whole lot more on the link embedded above, if you're curious about another specific player):

Nick Perry: 28 projected sacks, 1 missed game due to injury, +1.25 explosion index, overall a 90.6% rating

Whitney Mercilus: 21.5 projected sacks, 1 missed game due to injury, +0.11 explosion index, overall a 51.3% rating

Shea McClellin: 20.1 projected sacks, 2 missed games due to injury, +0.24 explosion index, overall a 62.9% rating

Courtney Upshaw: 17.2 projected sacks, 1 missed game due to injury, -1.07 explosion index, overall a 15.5% rating

Personally, after finding this tonight, I'm excited about the Nick Perry pick. I think TT found a gem, but I'm a big believer in advanced statistics. The data runs all the way back to the 1998 draft, and it suggests that Nick Perry will be one of the top 25 pass rushers drafted in the last 14 years. Even if he's not that good, he'll be a nice pairing with CM3 to get pressure on the QB.

What do you think APC? Did Ted Thompson get a massive steal, or are the advanced metrics misleading?