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 position and, and obviously you have needs, and best on board, and there’s a lot of things that go into this,” Ulbrich said after the Watts pick. “When I kept putting my safety cluster together, we were looking at this third to fourth round as kind of like the honey-hole for that. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even put Watts on it, because I had him as a second-round guy, and I thought he was going to be long gone. If we had had our second, he would have definitely been part of that conversation. The fact that we didn’t have that second anymore, I thought he was out of the conversation, and then he ends up being there.”
Watts was just as happy to be there, as he had patterned his overall game on Jessie Bates III, who would now be a teammate and mentor.
“I’m really excited to be teammates with him,” Watts said of Bates post-draft. “I just think we’re very similar. We’re similar in size. He gets the ball. He’s a playmaker. He can tackle well. So, I feel like we’re very similar in all aspects of the game of football.”
After the Falcons’ 27-24 win over the Los Angeles Rams on Monday night, we’re guessing that everybody is even happier that Watts lasted as long as he did in the draft. In that game, Watts picked off two of Matthew Stafford’s passes, and while he did allow two big-play receptions (weirdly enough, two 27-yard catches by fellow rookie Terence Ferguson, the Rams’ outstanding tight end from Oregon), if you kill as many drives as you help sustain, anybody will take that ratio.
Watts’ two interceptions were another matter. The first came with 1:48 left in the first half, and Watts was in the deep third, taking receiver Xavier Smith upfield in Cover-3. The Falcons did a nice job of disguising their intentions, as it looked like two-deep pre-snap, but Bates came down to rob the hook/curl area, and Watts used his open-field speed to take the ball away. This was an excellent combination of athleticism and acumen.
The second Watts pick came with 9:13 left in the game — this was fourth-and-2 from the Atlanta 27-yard line, and the Falcons up 24-17. This was also Cover-3, but Bates was the deep safety this time, while Watts was in the box, waiting to jump on Stafford’s in-cut to Ferguson. Here’s where Watts got his own back against his most formidable opponent on the night, and he nearly ran this one back. Again, the Falcons threw a wrinkle at Stafford — when cornerback Dee Alford followed Xavier Smith’s pre-snap motion, that was a man coverage tell… and then, it wasn’t. It’s possible that Stafford thought it was man coverage, and Watts might follow Smith on the vertical seam bender. As it turned out, Smith was completely uncovered upfield, but it mattered not.
Watts was also ready with the truck stick when necessary.
Now, Watts has the most interceptions for a Falcons rookie since Deion Sanders’ five in 1989, and there are likely a whole lot of NFL shot-callers who are re-discussing their evaluations of Watts as the draft came around.
“Yeah, that’s little bro right there,” Bates said of Watts after the Rams game. “Just to watch him come in and how urgent – he was able to pick up on things. To see it translate to the field, I knew it throughout training camp, through OTAs, the way that he could process installs and stuff like that. I’m just proud of him. I’m proud of him for sure.”
Head coach Raheem Morris was twice as happy about his two safeties.
“Two game ball winners today. Obviously, Jessie, he’s been that way since he’s been in the league. He touches the football, scores points, makes big-time plays. He did it today. And his young counterpart, Xavier Watts, has continued to show up throughout the course of the year and just get better and better, and play at a very high level.”
The NFL’s blunder is the Falcons’ gain, and that should continue to play itself out as Xavier Watts continues to grow and develop into the true defensive force he already was.