Pro Football Focus has put a name on what the Saints watched up close all last season. PFF’s Bradley Locker listed Chase Young among ten players positioned to earn their first All-Pro selection in 2026, a pick the team’s own site relayed in its Friday news roundup.
The case rests on what Young did once he got on the field in 2025. He missed the season’s first five games with a calf injury, then delivered the first double-digit-sack season of his career. Per the PFF writeup, his 86.3 pass-rush grade ranked eighth among qualified edge rushers, and his 15.2 percent pass-rush win rate placed in the 79th percentile at the position. Those are the underlying numbers of a rusher winning consistently, not one padding a sack total against bad tackles.
The trajectory matters as much as the grade. Young won Defensive Rookie of the Year in Washington in 2020, then spent the next several seasons fighting injuries and changing addresses before New Orleans became the place where the production finally matched the pedigree. At 27, he is squarely in the age band where edge rushers peak.
He also is not carrying the pass rush alone. Cameron Jordan, back on a one-year deal for a 16th and final season, hit double-digit sacks alongside Young in 2025, as NFL.com’s Nick Shook noted in his NFC South camp preview this week. A defense that finished ninth in the league last year returns its most productive edge pairing intact, with Brandon Staley’s scheme having given Young the wide alignments where his get-off does the most damage.
For a franchise that has spent years squeezing its budget to keep a roster together, Young’s leap is the cheapest kind of improvement: a player already under contract getting better. The Saints do not need him to validate a projection list. They need twelve more games like the ones he gave them after Week 6 — and if those arrive, the All-Pro voting will take care of itself.
Veterans report to camp in Metairie on July 28.
