No player drafted in the sixth round or later has ever recorded more than eight sacks in his rookie season, with Tennessee’s Carlos Hall and Tampa Bay’s Stylez G. White hitting that mark in 2002 and 2007, respectively.
(Was that an excuse to get a reference to Stylez G. White? You bet, even though White’s “rookie year” came five years after he was drafted.)
Perhaps more relevant here is that 39 players drafted in the sixth round or later have recorded at least three sacks in their rookie seasons. Richard Dent is among those players, beginning his Hall of Fame career with three sacks in 1983. He’s also the only Hall of Famer on that list.
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The point here: The Bears are high on sixth-round edge rusher Kylie Fitts, who flashed a knack for getting to the quarterback when he was healthy in college. But teams don’t draft players in the sixth round with the expectation they’ll change the unit they’re in or be the focal point of a defense. For every sixth rounder who made an in immediate impact on his team’s pass rush, there are dozens of anonymous players with abbreviated pro careers.
What may set Fitts apart from the sixth-round pack is that drafting him was a gamble on his health, and neither he nor the Bears believe the injuries that beset him at Utah are cause for long-term concerns. Fitts suffered a Lisfranc (foot) injury that sidelined him for all but two games in 2016, then missed a handful of games in 2017 due to shoulder and ankle injuries. In his lone full, healthy collegiate season (2015), Fitts notched seven sacks, eight tackles for a loss, 10 pass break-ups and four forced fumbles.
“There are no serious or lingering injuries that prevented me from playing and playing to my potential,” Fitts said. “I just kind of explained to (teams) that I think it was a run of bad luck and I think I got it all out of the way and (am) 100 percent healthy now and I’m ready to go.”
And as Ryan Pace put it: “It’s just a couple little nicks and bruises. Nothing is going to linger. So medically we were very comfortable with him.”
The Bears scouted Fitts at the Senior Bowl, and he tested well at the NFL Combine, fitting the profile of an athletic player with upside:
“(He) has a great size-speed combination that we value,” Pace said. “He’s also tough and instinctive. Love his get-off, extremely high character as well.”
On one hand, we shouldn’t get carried away with expectations for Fitts based on where he was drafted and his tough-luck history of injuries. But he’ll join an outside linebacker room full of questions: Will Leonard Floyd make a leap in Year 3? Can Aaron Lynch jump-start his career after re-uniting with his first defensive coordinator? Can both of those players, plus Fitts, stay healthy?
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Fitts will have plenty of opportunities to play in 2018, even if it’s as a situational pass-rusher. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll have success, but chances are, he’ll have the opportunity to play himself into being someone considered a sixth-round steal.
“We were expecting third to fifth (round) and then waited until that sixth round,” Fitts said. “I was a little surprised to go that late but I’m excited to just be a Bear. All I wanted was an opportunity and I knew with my injury history that teams may be a little scared. I know that the Bears are a good team and they are going to get a great player out of me.”