The 2020 NFL draft will be remembered for its trio of top-10 quarterbacks and the record-setting run on receivers that happened during the first two rounds. But the most significant positional outlier of the class came at offensive tackle. While the talent pool at receiver only continues to grow, the quality of offensive line play—in both college and the NFL—has stagnated. That’s why it was so abnormal to see four offensive tackles selected in the top 13 picks of the draft. It’s the first time that’s happened since 2013, and only the second time since 1985.
The 2020 class is truly a historic group. All four tackles taken in the top half of the first round—Andrew Thomas, Jedrick Wills Jr., Mekhi Becton, and Tristan Wirfs—will likely be asked to walk in and start for their respective teams immediately. Before the draft, I spoke to all four (and some of their college coaches) about how this year’s incredible group of prospects reached this point—and what their teams should expect this season and beyond.
Andrew Thomas
No. 4, Giants
Sam Pittman knew what he had in Thomas before their first practice together. In the summer of 2017, just before Thomas started his freshman year at Georgia, the Bulldogs’ offensive line gathered for a players-only workout. When the session ended, the group’s elder statesman came to the O-line coach with a glowing review. “Isaiah Wynn told me, ‘Y’all got something in that Andrew Thomas kid,’” says Pittman, who’s now the head coach at Arkansas. Wynn—who would be drafted 23rd overall by the Patriots in 2018—was Georgia’s left tackle at the time. He’d developed into the standard-bearer for a new generation of OL greatness at Georgia, a school that’s now produced three first-round tackles in the past three drafts. His blessing was a sign that Thomas was heading places.
The initial plan was for Thomas to learn behind Wynn for a year before succeeding him on the left side. It didn’t take long, though, for Pittman to realize that wasn’t in the cards. His latest recruit was simply too good to keep off the field. Pittman tossed the freshman in at right tackle and never lost a wink of sleep over it. “He’s one of the most intelligent linemen I’ve ever had,” Pittman says. “It was easy for him to learn. He was well, well coached out of high school. He came in in June … and started every game on a national runner-up team at right tackle.”
Thomas came to Georgia with both the stature and pedigree to start from day one. At 6-foot-5 and 326 pounds, the four-star recruit out of Pace Academy in Atlanta had garnered offers from powerhouse programs across the country. But what truly set Thomas apart—and what helped to make him arguably the safest OL pick in the 2020 draft—wasn’t his body. It was his mind.
Music has always been part of Thomas’s life. Every member of his family can carry a tune, and in high school, Thomas even moonlighted as a percussionist in the jazz band. As a drummer, he’s attuned to how patterns unfold, how a single note or beat fits into a composition. And he approaches football the same way. “The way my mind works, I like to understand why we’re doing something,’” Thomas says. “[When Pittman] would teach us the play, he wouldn’t just tell us our job. Like, ‘OK, block down.’ He would explain why we’re doing this. What we’re looking at. Why we’re running it out of this certain formation. Because when you understand it like that, you understand, to a better extent, what you should do to make the play work.” Using that perspective, Thomas did everything he could to sell plays, whether he was a focal point or not. On draws, he’d let defensive linemen beat him upfield before giving them an exaggerated club. He crafted his release on certain zone runs to look like his movements on different running plays. Each step and angle had a purpose.
Thomas eventually moved to left tackle as a sophomore, and during his two seasons there, he used that elevated approach to play out snaps in his head before they even happened. In last season’s SEC championship game, it didn’t seem to matter what exotic pressure package LSU’s defense threw at him—Thomas was ready for it. He knew that with LSU’s speed at linebacker, they were going to bring lots of twist stunts. Depending on how wide the outside linebacker was positioned, whether he was capped outside by a safety or nickel cornerback, and how wide the defensive tackle was stationed, Thomas had a good feel for who was coming his way at the snap. “It’s one thing to see it,” Pittman says. “It’s another thing to understand what’s going to happen if you see it. He was well prepared for looks that meant something. A lot of times, kids can learn that but they can’t benefit from it because their mind can’t process fast enough in a game to understand what this look means. For him, it all meant something.”
Along with LSU’s bevy of tricks, Thomas also had to contend with pass-rushing menace K’Lavon Chaisson. The All-SEC outside linebacker tallied 6.5 sacks during the Tigers’ national title run last season, and his length and impressive burst off the ball inspired Jacksonville to snag him with the 20th pick last weekend. Most of Thomas’s pass-rushing snaps at Georgia involved moving at a 45-degree angle away from the line of scrimmage, splitting the difference between a vertical pass set and a quick one. Against the majority of rushers, Thomas didn’t have to create too much separation at the snap to seal off the edge. But Chaisson was a different story. “Against him, I knew that first step was really big,” Thomas says. “Trying to get a little more vertical in my set was a big thing. And trying to use my length to my advantage, get a really good strike on him. With rushers like that, if you get a really good punch on him, sometimes you can get them off their rush a little bit.” Chaisson notched one sack late in the game when Thomas was slow getting out of his stance, but aside from that, he was largely held in check. Thomas beat Chaisson to the corner all afternoon, and when those speed rushes didn’t work, Thomas was prepared for any inside counter that Chaisson cooked up.
That type of performance against a future first-round pick helps eliminate some of the guesswork when projecting how Thomas will perform at the next level. He didn’t put up the record-breaking combine numbers that others in this class did, but Thomas might have the highest floor of any OL prospect in the draft. The Giants will be able to plug him in at right tackle from day one and know they’re getting—at worst—a reliable starter who should be capable in pass protection. Daniel Jones was pressured on a league-leading 41.7 percent of his dropbacks last season, according to Pro Football Focus. Getting Jones help up front was the Giants’ top priority heading into this season, and adding Thomas should go a long way in achieving that goal. With so much uncertainty surrounding when teams’ offseason programs will start and how much time rookies will have to learn a new offense, the Giants picked a quality player who won’t need much instruction to get going.
Jedrick Wills Jr.
No. 10, Browns
It’s hard to believe that Wills was ever undersized, but during his AAU days in Kentucky, he routinely found himself staring up at opponents. Wills played basketball through his sophomore year of high school, and by the end of his hoops career, he’d learned that his best chance to survive among the trees was to develop a perimeter game. “I was playing against guys who were like 6-foot-10 and heavily recruited to play center,” Wills says. “So I really had to turn myself into a 2 or a 3 and play out on the wing.”
Most 312-pound men could never dream of stepping out and smoothly beating players off the dribble—but Jedrick Wills isn’t your average 300-pounder. Elite offensive line prospects occasionally struggle to translate their eye-popping testing numbers to the field. A 6-foot-6 boulder of a human will tear off a 4.8 in the 40-yard dash, but that burst will never manifest on tape. Wills has no such trouble. His athleticism jumps off the screen and smacks you right in the face. He explodes out of his stance on pass sets before fluidly sliding into the backfield and riding defensive ends away from the quarterback. On certain run plays, he gets off the line so fast that it looks like a glitch in a video game.
When I asked Wills which NFL tackles he likes to study, the first two he mentioned were Cowboys mauler La’el Collins and future Hall of Famer Jason Peters. It’s a fascinating combination—and a perfect one to help describe Wills. He appreciates the intensity that Collins brings to the run game and tries to mimic that in his approach. “And throwing it back, Jason Peters has been in the league for almost 20 years,” Wills says. “He’s an OG player.” The love for Peters is apt, because Wills moves in an eerily similar way. Peters was a former tight end whose quick feet translated well to playing tackle. Wills brings that same nimbleness. He looks natural doing things that men his size never should. “He’s got the want-to part where he wants to finish people, that physicality,” says former Alabama offensive line coach Brent Key. “But he’s also got the other part, the DNA aspect of how explosive he is, playing with power, change of direction, the ability to bend, recover.”
As a two-year starter on Tua Tagovailoa’s blind side, Wills faced off with some of the best defensive linemen in the country, including 2020 draftees Derrick Brown, Marlon Davidson, and Darrell Taylor. But he says the best pass rusher he played against last season was actually 245-pound Michigan linebacker Josh Uche. “He was really fast off the ball,” Wills says. “He made you actually set to him. You had to get to your spot, or he’d beat you before the play even started. He had a countermove to almost everything.” Listening to Wills talk about the nuances of different pass rushers, it’s clear just how advanced his feel for pass blocking is for a 20-year-old. He develops detailed plans for how to deal with individual rushers based on their skill sets, and that varied approach is evident on tape.
Playing in Tuscaloosa is an ideal education for any prospective NFL lineman. As a sophomore starter, Wills got to play with guys like Jonah Williams, a lauded technician who the Bengals later drafted 11th in 2019. During his final season with the Crimson Tide, Wills learned from offensive line coach Kyle Flood, who’d spent the previous two years as the assistant OL coach for the Falcons. More than anything, though, it was time with Nick Saban that showed Wills how to treat football like a profession. Wills quickly learned that if he wanted to avoid Saban’s wrath, he’d have to tone down his desire to bury defenders as plays came to a close. “If you don’t hold back a little bit, you know the penalty [flag] is gonna get thrown,” Wills says. “The game that we’re playing today, you can’t really kill everyone on every play. You know that the penalty is coming and you’re gonna get your ass ripped on the other end.”
When I asked Wills for his favorite Saban story, I had him repeat his answer, just to make sure I was hearing it right. Apparently, Nick Saban—who doesn’t seem aware of humor as a concept—loves “deez nuts” jokes. This first came to light last fall, when former Alabama and current Raiders running back Josh Jacobs revealed the bombshell on The Dan Patrick Show. But that hasn’t slowed Saban down. “It’s day in and day out,” Wills says. “You’re not ready for it, and you don’t expect it. But it’s going to happen, no matter what. Seriously, he’ll do it with a straight face.”
Testicle comedy aside, Saban’s program has become a cradle of pro talent for a reason. And Cleveland is hoping that Wills can be the latest Alabama star to take flight in the NFL. A starting left tackle was the Browns’ most glaring roster deficiency heading into the offseason, and they may have gotten the best option in the draft with the 10th pick. Wills’s movement skills should make him a perfect fit for the zone-heavy play-action scheme that head coach Kevin Stefanski is bringing to Cleveland. And along with free-agent signee Jack Conklin, the Browns should have two solid bookends for years to come. Wills will step in as the Browns’ left tackle immediately, and although flipping sides may be a bumpy transition at first, he has more than enough athleticism to thrive in that role.
Mekhi Becton
No. 11, Jets
Mekhi Becton comes by his love of food honestly. Becton’s mother, Semone, is a caterer, and when he was growing up in Highland Springs, Virginia, the fridge was always stocked with whatever fresh dish she’d whipped up that day. “I saw my mom cooking growing up, so it’s something that I’ve always been interested in,” Becton says. These days, Becton spends time in the kitchen making his own versions of mom’s salmon, chicken, and steak, and despite one unnamed scout’s pre-draft concerns, that affinity for cooking wasn’t enough to dissuade the Jets from taking him with the 11th pick.
It’s not a stretch to say that there’s never been an offensive lineman quite like Mekhi Becton. At 364 pounds, he posted a 5.1 in the 40-yard dash at the combine—making him the first player to ever crack 5.2 at 355-plus pounds. There have been very few people in the history of humanity that are as big, strong, and fast as Becton, and that makes his ceiling as a prospect virtually limitless.
Respected offensive line guru Duke Manyweather has trained Becton since he declared for the draft in December. Along with the fitness regimen and on-field skill work, Manyweather’s program also includes a classroom element. At his facility in Frisco, Texas (or these days, over text and email), Manyweather shares clips of star offensive linemen and techniques he thinks might help his young students. For most of the dozen draftees that Manyweather trained this year, the focus was typically on current players and clients like Terron Armstead and Lane Johnson. But with Becton, Manyweather had to hop in a time machine, going back to once-in-a-generation talents like Jonathan Ogden and Orlando Pace. Manyweather cautions against throwing a gold jacket on Becton just yet, but he contends that Becton has the same makeup of those all-time-great tackles. “Especially because those guys possess the same type of physical traits, we try to take the stuff they did and add to the toolbox,” Manyweather says. “There are a lot of guys that have that frame that don’t pan out. … The difference with him is the mentality, and how he uses it. He knows how to use his hands, has elite power, is a tremendous athlete, and does a good job understanding what his strengths are. That’s the difference. It’s not the frame. It’s everything that comes along with his frame.”
The end goal for Becton is to learn how to use his commanding size in the same ways that Ogden and Pace did. But those tactics are a bit advanced for a guy who just turned 21. So far, Becton has mostly relied on manhandling his opponents every time he gets his hands on them. Becton moves people in a way most offensive linemen could only dream about. When he gets a hold of a defender, the play ends in an instant—and because of that, Manyweather says some analysts struggled to properly evaluate him. “People have said, ‘Well, he’s never in pass protection for more than two seconds,’” Manyweather says. “And I said, ‘You’re 100 percent correct. Because he’s ending the fight in two seconds.’ He gets to the top of his set, and once he gets his hands on people, they don’t get off. It’s the same thing with Tyron Smith.”
Becton says that it was between his sophomore and junior years when started to understand how to fully harness the power of his enormous frame. He didn’t have to just block defensive linemen. He could break them. “It just clicked,” Becton says. “I figured out I could always be more physical than the man across from me.”
Becton probably requires a bit more fine-tuning than the other ready-made tackles in this class. The frequency of play-action in Louisville’s offense prevented Becton from taking many traditional pass sets. But for a team like the Jets, who badly needed an upgrade in talent along a barren offensive line, the potential was too much to ignore. Becton’s combination of power, length, and shocking quickness is unlike anything another tackle in this draft could offer—and honestly, unlike anything the NFL has seen in a long time.
Tristan Wirfs
No. 13, Buccaneers
During Kirk Ferentz’s 21 years as Iowa’s head coach, the program has morphed into a factory for NFL linemen. Since 2000, only Alabama (seven) and Wisconsin (seven) have produced more first-round offensive linemen than the Hawkeyes (five)—and that doesn’t include future Hall of Fame guard Marshal Yanda, who was a third-round pick by the Ravens in 2007. Despite all that talent, though, only one freshman lineman has ever started for Ferentz: Wirfs.
Tim Polasek was hired as Iowa’s offensive line coach in 2017, the same year that Wirfs arrived on campus. Polasek had helped build an FCS dynasty at North Dakota State, but when he first saw Wirfs, he knew this gig would be a little different. “I didn’t know much,” Polasek says. “Hell, I’ve been at North Dakota State and here. But I’d venture to say this is what the recruits at Alabama look like.” Part of the reason that freshmen rarely saw the field at Iowa is that few of them were physically mature enough to contribute. But as a four-star recruit from nearby Mount Vernon, Wirfs was a different caliber of prospect. At 6-foot-5 and 308 pounds, he was ready to play from the start, and after the Hawkeyes lost two starting tackles to injury, he got that chance.
The entire afternoon is still a blur. “I just remember seeing flashes of blue and orange flying around,” Wirfs says of his first start against Illinois. “It was my first time out there. ‘Fight for survival’ is a good way to put it. I would tell myself, ‘Just get in front of him. Just throw your body at him if you have to.’” Wirfs spent that season simply trying to keep his head above water. Thrust into starting duty less than a month into his first semester, he never had time to learn the playbook. He got by purely on size and athleticism, and he leaned on the players around him to shout instructions. “I played next to a senior, and he’d just say, ‘Block this guy,’” Wirfs says. “It kind of felt like he was a superhero. His hand would come out of nowhere, and he’d help me out. He was always looking out for me.”
The three seasons that Wirfs spent in Iowa are a study in how offensive linemen improve. His first year, he subsisted on nothing but god-given ability. As a sophomore, he grasped the basics of Iowa’s protection schemes and used that knowledge to slow the game down. “Going into my third year, Coach Polasek said, ‘You dictate to them,’” Wirfs says. “‘Your set can throw off their rush plan, and they’re not going to know what to do.’ That was kind of my thing. If I got my hands on them as fast as I could, I’d be all right.” By the end of last season, the flashes of color Wirfs had seen as a freshman were moving at a crawl. The game had gone from fast-forward to slow motion, and it showed in his play.
Wirfs is one of the most explosive linemen to ever attend the NFL combine. He tested in the 99th percentile among offensive tackles in both the broad jump and vertical leap and the 98th in the 40-yard dash. Last year, he broke Brandon Scherff’s Iowa record by hang-cleaning 450 pounds four times. He’s 320 pounds of combustible energy. But he rarely has to play like that. Watching Wirfs, it’s easy to forget that he’s one of the best athletes on the planet—and that’s not meant as a slight. Wirfs plays with so much control that he’s rarely in a hurry or fighting to recover. He has an uncanny ability to harness his size and power, which Wirfs attributes to his wrestling background. “You get in scrambles in wrestling,” Wirfs explains. “Not all the time in heavyweight, but it happens. And I’ve thought about that, how it translates to football. You get off-kilter. Your center of balance is tweaked. And you know how to get that back. Just awareness, too. Being big guys out on the mat, you don’t have nearly the amount of space to work with as the 106-pounders [have]. I had to know—if I was gonna set up a move—where I was on the mat.”
Some people have looked at Wirfs’s calm, collected style and concluded that he simply isn’t mean enough to dominate as an offensive lineman—a criticism that Wirfs has struggled to understand. “I’ve been told that quite a bit,” Wirfs says. “Teams at the combine told me that. It’s always been that you have to have a mean streak. I think it’s more frustrating for a defensive lineman if you put him on his back and you’re smiling. And you keep doing it. Rather than if you’re in his face and talking crap, you put him on his back with a smile.” And Wirfs has done that plenty.
As Peter King detailed on Monday, the Bucs made a point to trade up one pick in the first round to ensure that no team stole Wirfs from under their noses. After adding Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski this offseason, Tampa Bay still needed a starting right tackle to round out the offense, and the Bucs got an uncommonly talented one with the 13th pick. Wirfs has the physical makeup and background to be an immediate contributor, and he also has a head start on the mental side. Iowa’s offensive system resembles NFL offenses in a way that most spread-out college schemes don’t. “The way we teach the positions are very similar,” Polasek says. “He’s been exposed to man protections, he’s been exposed to gap protections, he’s been exposed to slide protections. All the stuff he’s going to be asked to do, he’s learned already. The verbiage is just going to be different.” Considering that some viewed Wirfs as a potential target for the Giants at no. 4, the Bucs had to be doing backflips after landing him nine picks later.
