When the Packers took Dani Dennis-Sutton in the fourth round back in April, plenty of outside voices treated it as one of those picks that might help the run defense, maybe give you a rotational piece, and not much more. Seven weeks into his rookie year, that read is already looking shaky.
Dennis-Sutton entered the league with the kind of profile that splits evaluators. He’s listed at 6-foot-5 and 265 pounds, with 33.5-inch arms, and his combine workout put him among the most athletic edge rushers ever to come through the event.
He finished with a 9.96 relative athletic score. At Penn State, he backed up the traits with production, posting 8.5 sacks in each of his last two seasons while his snaps, pressures and run stops all climbed year by year.
He flashed a polished pass-rush arsenal, held up against the run and did it against strong competition.
The question was never whether the tools were there. It was why they didn’t always show up cleanly on film.
Dennis-Sutton had a habit of being close to the play without always finishing it - nearly affecting the quarterback here, nearly making the stop there. The splash was obvious.
The consistency was not.
That was part of why some draft analysts were cold on Green Bay’s class overall. The Athletic’s Dane Brugler ranked it 26th out of 32, while NFL Media’s Lance Zierlein gave the Packers a C-minus. Their concerns about Dennis-Sutton centered on the same themes: a dependable edge player with limited upside as a pass rusher.
“Dennis-Sutton will find sack production harder to come by against NFL blocking, but he is a commanding presence and has the size, strength and quickness to be a force player on the edge. He will be more appealing to teams looking for a 'high-floor' role player, as opposed to a 'high-ceiling' pass rusher.”
“Dennis-Sutton is a base defensive end with toughness. He’s effective against the run, but he has limited pass-rushing upside. ...
Dennis-Sutton is equipped to muddy running lanes but might not make many impact plays. He has average upside as an odd- or even-front end.”
Those projections haven’t aged especially well so far. According to Next Gen Stats, Dennis-Sutton has 21 total pressures, which ranks second among rookies and 24th among all players.
Even more eye-opening, he has produced those 21 pressures on just 97 pass-rushing snaps, a 21.6 percent pressure rate. That ranks third in the league, trailing only Dallas Turner and Trey Hendrickson.
It’s also a higher rate than Micah Parsons posted last season.
Green Bay has needed that kind of edge presence, and Dennis-Sutton has been a big reason the defense has been able to keep functioning without Parsons. Along with Lukas Van Ness and contributors like Brenton Cox Jr. and Barryn Sorrell, he has helped give the Packers a pass rush that hasn’t become a weakness.
Against the run, he’s been just as useful. PFF has him at a 70.5 run defense grade, second among Green Bay edge rushers, with two run stops and an average depth of tackle of -0.7 yards.
His average run tackle is ending up in the backfield.
What stands out most, though, is how often he’s making something happen. Cox and Sorrell have shown flashes.
Dennis-Sutton has shown up over and over. He’s in the backfield.
He’s pressuring the quarterback. He’s making tackles.
That steady presence is exactly what he needed to add, and it has already made him one of the more underrated players on the Packers’ roster.
If this keeps going, Dennis-Sutton will fit right into the kind of fourth-round value Brian Gutekunst has found before, with Evan Williams, Zach Bako-Bewele and Romeo Doubs among the names selected there. In a year without a first-round pick, that kind of return matters.
In Other News...
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It has been a while since the Packers have had to deal with that kind of strain on the ground. Their last true stress test came back in Week 3 against Bijan Robinson, when the Falcons leaned on the run game and exposed some cracks. Since then, Green Bay has had more time to settle in, but Detroit brings a different level of urgency, and this game should go a long way toward showing whether the Packers can hold up when the matchup tilts in the trenches. [Read more 🡒]