My sleeper is Trevor Nowaske, and the bet is about patience paying off. Here’s the part people skip: rushing the passer at an NFL level is its own craft, and Nowaske is still early in learning it. He came out of Division II Saginaw Valley State, where the competition was a step down and the schemes were nowhere near the complexity he’s seeing now. He played off-ball linebacker at SVSU, bouncing between MIKE and SAM and even dropping into the slot in coverage. He was never an edge setter or pass rusher. Asking him to win rushing the passer in the NFL is building a new skill from the ground up. It’s a multi-year climb that needs reps, coaching, and time.
And that’s the thing about Detroit’s SAM role: it’s not a traditional off-ball LB. The Lions ask their SAM to line up on the ball as a hybrid DE — rush the passer, set the edge in the run game, drop into coverage. It’s why PFF logged roughly 81% of Nowaske’s snaps last season on the edge.
The flashes already came. He was an average player last year with 64.9pff grade in limited snaps, but over one two-week stretch he graded out at 87.6 — 10th among all edge defenders on that sample, just behind Aidan Hutchinson. Small sample, no doubt. But that’s the whole point of a sleeper: you’re not betting on a sure thing, you’re betting on the trajectory.
The raw athleticism was never in question. He’s a 6-3, 237 athlete with a 9.86 RAS was top two percent of linebackers since 1987. Elite tools sometimes just need seasoning.
As Kelvin Sheppard put it: “Honestly, if Trevor Nowaske continues to play the way he’s playing, the only way Jack ends up out there (at SAM) is if Trevor glitches out on me.” With all the attention on Jack Campbell’s new All-Pro extension and Barnes locked in at SAM, it’s easy to forget there’s a freak athlete sitting right behind them, one whose whole game is a brand-new skill that’s just starting to click. People are always looking for the year those young players experience starts to just click. Given his time in this system, we might have something and it just might explain why we haven’t added more depth to the LB room after Anzalone’s departure.