Packers GM Brian Gutekunst on RAS and Projecting High-Traits Prospects to NFL

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Texas A&M’s Shemar Stewart is one of the most polarizing prospects in the 2025 NFL Draft. He has off-the-charts athleticism and upside. He had bottom-of-the-charts production in college.

As Green Bay Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst and his scouts discussed one prospect after another in the lead-up to Thursday’s first round, the potential-vs.-production debate is central to stacking the draft board and picking players.

“What you’re trying to predict is what they’re going to do in the National Football League. That’s first and foremost,” Gutekunst said on Monday.

Gutekunst wasn’t asked specifically about Stewart, though he might have guessed the subject when asked the question.

Stewart had 1.5 sacks in 2022, 1.5 sacks in 2023 and 1.5 sacks in 2024. A player with that type of production doesn’t speak to being a potential first-round pick. On the other hand, his Relative Athletic Score – an amalgamation of height, weight, 40-yard time and other athletic testing numbers – was a perfect 10.0. That means he’s in the 100th percentile among all edge-defending prospects dating to 1987. That screams first-round pick.

“If a player didn't have the kind of production that you think he should at the college level, there’s a lot of discussion about why, why that was and if you think that’s something that as he moves forward and he progresses as a football player, if that’s going to change or not,” Gutekunst said.

“So, that’s really it at the end of the day. It’s just a matter of looking at his game and as he moves into the National Football League, will those traits allow him to become a more productive player than maybe he was in college? So, I think that’s kind of how you look at it.”

Gutekunst said the team doesn’t use RAS “at all.” Rather the team’s analytics staff has its own tool to “measure athletic traits and other things.”

Regardless of the formula, there’s no tried-and-true way to figure out whether a great athlete can become a great football player.

Odafe Oweh, who had zero sacks during his final season at Penn State but had a RAS of 9.92, was the Ravens’ first-round pick in 2021. He delivered 10 sacks in 2024.

On the other hand, the same draft class produced Payton Turner. In five games at Houston in 2020, he had five sacks. Next, he produced a RAS of 9.74. Taken three picks earlier than Oweh by the Saints, he has five sacks in four seasons, including two in 16 games last year.

“It’s just really about where he is in his kind of evolution as a player, where he’s on that cure,” Gutekunst said. “Particularly now with guys coming out really early (and) some guys have been in college seven, eight years now and you’re looking at those different things. It’s no different than when you sign a guy to a contract or you draft a guy, you’re really trying to do it for what he’s going to do over the next three or four years, not what he’s done. So, it’s about that.”

There probably were similar discussions with Michigan cornerback Will Johnson. Johnson was a two-time All-American in three college seasons. In 32 career games, he intercepted nine passes and returned three for touchdowns. So, the production against elite competition is on film.

However, there are unanswered questions about his speed after he decided not to run a 40. So, in a case that is the opposite of Stewart, would Johnson be worthy of the 23rd pick if his speed limits his upside and perhaps what the Packers want to do on defense.

“Traits are very, very important to us,” Gutekunst said. “Testing numbers are important, and that’s part of the changing world in scouting right now. These guys are really picking and choosing what they do. We don’t have universal numbers across the board like we used to, which makes it tough, but there are some new technologies coming into play with GPS data and things like that, that you kind of have to try to make up for it.”

Not every school has GPS data, Gutekunst said, but the power schools do, as do the all-star games. That data can help fill the void of not having testing results or determining whether a player has better game speed than stopwatch speed.

“We do have a lot of data, and our guys do a great job under Mike Halbach and football technology of putting that into kind of a format that makes sense for us,” Gutekunst said. “So, if we don’t have certain testing numbers, maybe we have something that can make up for that.”

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