The Falcoholic
Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar writes about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. In this installment, we focus on Atlanta Falcons rookie safety Xavier Watts, who was ignored by the NFL until the third round of the 2025 draft. The Falcons couldn’t believe that, and now, they feel quite blessed that the rest of the league let them pick Watts off as he’s picked opponents off… especially against the Rams on Monday night.
When you’re a draft analyst, there are times when you have absolutely no idea what the NFL is thinking. There are times when a prospect has all the tape, all the metrics, and all the potential to be a first-round talent in the pros, and for whatever reason, the pros don’t agree.
This was the case in my pre-draft analysis of Notre Dame safety Xavier Watts. The safety position in the 2025 draft was basically a three-man race to the top with Watts, Georgia’s Malaki Starks, and South Carolina’s Nick Emmanwori as the primary guys, and it just depended on which type of defender you preferred. Emmanwori went to the Seattle Seahawks with the 35th overall pick in the second round to be head coach Mike Macdonald’s new Kyle Hamilton (Macdonald had helped Hamilton become what he is as Baltimore’s defensive coordinator in 2022 and 2023), and that’s worked out pretty well so far. Starks went to the Ravens with the 27th overall pick in the first round, and he’s played well for the most part.
Watts, who I believed to be the best deep-third safety in this class by a fairly wide margin — and if you don’t have a credible deep-third safety in today’s NFL, your defense is utterly hosed — somehow lasted until the 96th pick in the third round.
Based on his college performance, this made less than no sense to me.
Maybe the NFL saw Watts as a tweener at 5’11¾” and 204 pounds. Or perhaps his 4.58-second 40-yard dash and 1.58-second 10-yard split scared people off. But this was a guy coming off a killer season in a major program, and he was shutting down some of the NCAA’s best passing games. In 2024, Watts allowed 17 catches on 32 targets for 179 yards, 115 yards after the catch, no touchdowns, six interceptions, four pass breakups, and an opponent passer rating of 30.1. This after a 2023 season in which he allowed 19 catches on 32 targets for 198 yards, 88 yards after the catch, no touchdowns, seven interceptions, and an opponent passer rating of 37.8. And as a deep safety last season (67% of his overall snaps), Watts picked off as many passes (four) as he allowed catches.
I don’t know what more the NFL needed to see, but new Falcons defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich was more than happy to profit from this major miscalculation.
“It’s funny, you create these clusters of players at every...
