Where does burn rate allowed tell an honest story about a cornerback’s playmaking ability, and where do we need a lot more information? We take a look.
NFL draft cornerback prospects are some of the most insane people in sports.
These young men believe that not only can they play in the NFL, but they can backpedal and cover NFL wide receivers who each year seem to reach new heights of athleticism that the sport’s founders never could have dreamed about.
You’d better have the ability to play, then, and the 2025 NFL Draft cornerback class has a handful of good ones who can. This ranking is a collection of data on eight of them from Opta Analyst, whose game-charters have tracked each of their college careers.
We’ve picked out the eight highest-ranked cornerbacks on the industry consensus big board, ranked them by 2024 burn rate allowed (the percentage of their targets on which the receiver they’re covering got open to position the offense for a successful play), and added context on their performances.
Where does burn rate allowed tell an honest story about a cornerback’s playmaking ability, and where do we need a lot more information?
Let’s talk about it.
1. Jahdae Barron, Texas (36.1% burn rate allowed)
Barron passes both the eye test and the Opta Analyst data test. I sat in the stands at Vanderbilt last season and watched Barron thump his way through a game against the Commodores, closing quickly on passes in his direction and laying his body on whichever black jerseys he could find.
None of the top corners in the class got burned less often than he did in 2024, and Barron’s supporting tracking numbers were excellent, too: 7.1 burn yards allowed per target (compared to an average of 8.6 for the players on this list) and an 11.3% big play rate allowed, also the best among this cohort.
Barron put these numbers together against an SEC and College Football Playoff schedule, playing 401 snaps in coverage whether it be zone coverage, or man or press-man coverage. That was 30 more than anyone else on our list. Production in bulk quantity! I’d be excited to have him as a starting cornerback on my NFL team.
2. Travis Hunter, Colorado (37.8%)
Hunter wasn’t the clear-cut best receiver in college football last year, and he wasn’t the clear-cut best cornerback. But he was pretty close to both, and therein lies his genius.
The great strength of Hunter’s game as a wideout is his movement skills, and ability to high point the football and make people miss him, and his strength as a cornerback is the inverse: his extreme stickiness to the receivers he’s covering. Hunter let up just 1.1 burn yards per snap, among the lowest rates of any cornerback now in the draft, and posted a low burn rate despite mixing in his 316 coverage snaps with a full receiver workload.
The most notable Hunter stat, though, is the one about how little he worked. Opposing quarterbacks targeted Hunter a mere 11.7% of the time on his coverage snaps, a much lower rate than anyone else on this list and a stunningly low figure for any No. 1 corner in college football. Don’t judge Hunter by what he did when the ball was thrown his way, but by how infrequently it was thrown his way in the first place.
3. Shavon Revel Jr., East Carolina (39.1%)
Revel played a short 2024 thanks to an ACL tear in the Pirates’ third game. The year before, he led ECU in burn yards allowed per target (8.7%) and was a man whom AAC quarterbacks tried hard to avoid.
In limited action last year, Revel was usually sticky (hence the 39% burn rate and a by far-best-in-class 43.5% open rate allowed) but let up a 27% big play rate, one of the worst marks among the top cornerbacks in the class.
It’s worth noting here that because of Revel’s early injury, we didn’t get to see him play football against anyone other than an FCS team (Norfolk State) and two mediocre Group of Five teams, Old Dominion and Appalachian State. He has good physical traits, but we’re working off a lot of projection here.
4. Benjamin Morrison, Notre Dame (44%)
Morrison allowed a 12.1% big play rate on his 25 defensive targets before an injury knocked him out in the sixth game of the season. He was the Irish’s No. 1 cornerback, and they gradually came to feel his absence acutely as a rotating cast of younger cornerbacks tried to stop star receivers as Notre Dame was making its run to the national championship game.
The other Irish defensive backs were mostly up to the challenge, but a few receivers really torched Notre Dame’s rotating cast of corners after Morrison went out. USC’s Makai Lemon dropped 133 yards on Notre Dame in the regular season finale, and most famously, Jeremiah Smith sealed the title game by catching a deep ball down the right sideline against sophomore Christian Gray.
That’s what happens when a legitimate No. 1 corner with instincts and ball skills gets hurt.
5. Trey Amos, Ole Miss (46%)
Amos was a three-stop college player, first playing a key role in three years at Louisiana, then stopping for a season at Alabama as a backup, and then exploding into a first-team All-SEC performer at Ole Miss.
Amos was a heavy lifter for the Rebels, playing more snaps (797) than anyone else and putting up quality numbers across the board. His 16 passes defensed tied him with Barron and a few others for the power conference lead nationally.
He’s considered to have an ideal blend of size and speed.
6. Azareye’h Thomas, Florida State (47.1%)
Thomas is a classic case of a player whom college football fans might miss completely, until they see his name come up early in the draft.
He was a backup on Florida State’s undefeated (until an exhibition bowl game) 2023 team and didn’t get much of a look for the Seminoles until 2024, when FSU was falling off the face of the earth.
While the Noles finished 2-10 with a mere one FBS victory, Thomas established himself as a serious draft prospect, allowing a stingy 13.2% big play rate on 34 targets and a best-on-this-list 0.9 burn yards per snap. Hopefully, he will get to enjoy more than two wins this fall with his pro team.
7. Maxwell Hairston, Kentucky (47.4%)
Hairston is a scouting combine breakthrough case. His 4.28-second 40-yard dash made him a buzzy prospect, and he now stands a great chance of being at worst a second-round pick. Hairston’s numbers at Kentucky aren’t the reason for that status:
He found himself getting hit up for big gainers more often than most of his peers on this list, with a 27.2% big play rate allowed and 10.9 burn yards allowed per target. Both of those are the worst among the eight consensus top cornerback prospects.
Hairston was hurt for a chunk of 2024, and it remains to be seen if he’ll play purely outside cornerback (where he lived at Kentucky) or if his 5-foot-11, 183-pound build leads to him working inside as an NFL player.
8. Will Johnson, Michigan (50%)
What’s Johnson doing all the way down here? Well, being injured. Johnson played just six games in 2024, the last in mid-October, and his medical status was often unknown to the world until right before kickoff.
Other than intercepting a pass and running it back for a touchdown to seal an angsty season-opening win against Fresno State, Johnson had a quiet, abbreviated season. He defended five passes and wasn’t the lockdown cornerback at the line of scrimmage that Michigan expected coming off a national title season.
Best to view all of that as an anomaly, though. Johnson was a star in the Wolverines’ 2023 title season, when he allowed a 42.1% burn rate and quarterbacks simply preferred not to throw to their No. 1 receivers if they were in Johnson’s vicinity.
Johnson was targeted on just 14.9% of his coverage snaps that year when he lined up at his usual position of outside corner, and he didn’t allow a single touchdown on a burn while posting eight passes defensed on a hilariously low 39 targets over the whole season.
Johnson, who is also considered to be elite in run support, is a star and the rare player whose last season in college should just be ignored by draft evaluators.
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NFL Draft Cornerback Rankings: Who Are the Stickiest Prospects Available? Opta Analyst.
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