Six Edge Rushers In Round 1: How 2026 Stacks Against 2022's Walker-Hutchinson Top

The 2026 NFL Draft sent six edge rushers off the board in the first round, one more than the five who went in 2022 — the class fans remember for Travon Walker at No. 1, Aidan Hutchinson at No. 2, and Kayvon Thibodeaux at No. 5. On the surface that reads as an upgrade: six is more than five. The order in which they came off the board tells a different story. In 2022 the edge position produced both of the top two overall picks and three of the top five. In 2026 the first edge defender didn't hear his name until No. 2, only two went inside the top five, and the player who entered the weekend as the consensus best pass rusher in the class slid all the way to No. 15. More volume, less ceiling.

The first edge off the board was Texas Tech's David Bailey, taken No. 2 overall by the New York Jets. Bailey co-led the FBS with 14.5 sacks in 2025 and added 19.5 tackles for loss, second-most in the country, a consensus All-American season that capped a 29-sack college career split between Stanford and a transfer year in Lubbock. He is the highest-drafted defensive player in Texas Tech history and the program's first top-five pick of the modern era. The Jets took him over Ohio State's Arvell Reese, the hybrid the New York Giants would grab three picks later at No. 5.

Reese is the asterisk in any edge count. The Giants and NFL.com officially list him as an edge defender, and under that classification he is the second edge taken. But Reese won the Big Ten's Butkus-Fitzgerald Linebacker of the Year award in 2025 and split his snaps almost evenly between the line and off-ball linebacker — 69 tackles, 10 tackles for loss, 6.5 sacks across 14 games. Call him a pure edge and the 2026 first round had six; call him a linebacker and it had five. Either way, the volume holds up against 2022. The star power does not.

The deepest irony of the weekend was where Miami's Rueben Bain Jr. landed. Bain was the 2025 ACC Defensive Player of the Year and won the Ted Hendricks Award as the nation's top defensive end after a 9.5-sack, 15.5-TFL season. He was a consensus first-team All-American and, in many pre-draft boards, the top edge in the class. He fell to No. 15, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were happy to catch him. A reigning national-best-at-position award winner sliding to the middle of the first round is the kind of value gap that only opens when a class is deep enough that teams trust they'll get a comparable player later.

The middle of the round leaned on production from the ACC and Big 12. The Los Angeles Chargers took Bain's Miami teammate Akheem Mesidor at No. 22 — a 25-year-old Canadian who led the ACC with 12.5 sacks in 2025 and finished his college career with 35.5 sacks and 52.5 tackles for loss. The Dallas Cowboys grabbed UCF's Malachi Lawrence at No. 23 (seven sacks, 11 TFL, first-team All-Big 12; 20 career sacks). And the Tennessee Titans traded back into the first round with Buffalo to take Auburn's Keldric Faulk at No. 31 — a 6-foot-6, 276-pound project whose 10 career sacks undersell the traits that made him a third-team All-SEC selection.

Analysts had this group pegged as strong and deep going in. NFL.com ranked edge rusher among the loaded position groups of the class, and PFF flagged three edge defenders with legitimate top-10 grades before noting the depth thinned into rotational players by Day 3. That is the precise shape the first round confirmed: real depth, several first-round bodies, but no Hutchinson, no Walker, nobody the entire league agreed had to come off the board in the first three picks. The position was a need-filler this year, not a draft-defining headline.

The honest verdict is that 2026 and 2022 are different kinds of good. The 2022 edge class was top-heavy and historic — three top-five picks, the first time that had happened in five years, and the No. 1 and No. 2 selections both rushing the passer. The 2026 class was broad and reliable: six first-round bodies (or five, by a stricter definition), a deep middle, and a top end strong enough that a national award winner slid to No. 15 without anyone panicking. If you needed a pass rusher in the first round this year, you got one. You just didn't get the guarantee that 2022 sold at the very top of the board.