Kool Aid McKinstry drafted 41st overall by New Orleans Saints

Arnold or Kool-Aid, that has been the raging debate this offseason between which of Alabama’s two outstanding corners fans would draft as a GM.

If Terrion Arnold is the flashy supercar, the one that wows you with excitement but that may get stuck in your driveway at times, then Kool-Aid is the 1974 Fleetside with 600,000 miles on it: Reliable as they come, simply will not let you down, and you know you’ll still have it a decade later.

Only your tolerance for risk and FOMO can decide which is the player for you, but if my job were on the line, give me Kool-Aid as the everyday driver...at least at this point in their careers.

Let’s talk about Ga’Quincy “Kool-Aid” McKinstry.

McKinstry is actually a little bigger than Arnold is, though you wouldn’t guess it. He’s just a shade under 6’ and almost 200 pounds. He’s not the elite athlete of Arnold, but he’s plenty athletic enough for the NFL. He has outstanding hips, great footwork, great positioning, and he’s remarkably smart on an island.

I don’t recall the last time, one-on-one, that Kool-Aid gave up a deep ball. He simply refuses to let players get behind him, playing far faster than his straight line speed would suggest. And, for a player that stays in phase like McKinstry, and uses the sideline as well as he does, that flat-forty is a bit overrated in his case in any event.

What teams will particularly love about him is his hands. Not in the sense that he reels in interceptions or makes SportCenter highlight plays, rather that he battles very well off the line and all the way down the field, in many ways already mirroring more polished NFL DBs. If the word for Arnold is “promise,” then the word for Kool-Aid is “polish.”

He’s the most polished prospect in the draft, in terms of being a pure cover corner.

There are some knocks on his game — and they won’t be new to ‘Bama fans. The first is that he just doesn’t play as physical as his frame suggests he should. He’s a good tackler, but he’s not going to down a lot of guys straight-up in run support. He will need to work on his physicality across the board though. He relies so much on his positioning and footwork, staying in phase with his man, that he rarely has needed to get in the trenches with bigger guys.

The matchup vs. LSU’s Brian Thomas shows how he plays against superior size. The 6’4” Thomas was in man much of the night against Kool-Aid, and was used more as a decoy than anything else to clear out space for Nabers. And McKinstry was on him like white on rice, held to just three catches. But, when the ball was actually did get to Thomas, the larger frame won out, and Kool-Aid had a hard time bringing down the big fella.

That brings us to Kool-Aid’s other supposed weakness: his lack of production. I simply do not think NFL neckbeards who don’t watch the Saturday game realize how incredibly bored Kool-Aid was for the last two seasons. Teams tested him as a freshman, to their cost. And the next two years, he saw the fewest targets of any of the DBs.

How good was he? He was quite literally the best defensive player in the country in 2022. High praise on a team with Will Anderson.

But the math don’t lie, fellas.

On the season, Kool-Aid is T-17th in passed defended (13), he is 8th in passes broken up (12), and makes a play on 1.18 passes per game. But he has hands down been isolated the fewest times too on Alabama’s defense. He is seeing about five passes his way per game. He is batting them down or defending one of them. Two of them are harmless incompletions. And he is allowing just under 3 completions per game (39% completion percentage-against, tops in the country). He has surrendered just two touchdowns in man coverage this season, and on 3rd down, teams are completing even fewer attempts — 31%. In 11 games, he has allowed just 27 completions.

In short, teams teams almost double their chances at a completion throwing anywhere other than his direction.

Kool-Aid has saved his best for the best, as well: 10 of those PBU have come in conference play, with 9 against teams with winning records; and 9 of those PDs are in SEC play with 7 against teams with winning records. And some teams almost didn’t even bother throwing his direction. He notched zero stats against UT for instance, because the Vols didn’t even think about throwing at him. The Aggies targeted him just once. The Ole Miss Rebels did so a mere three times. The pass-happy MSU Bulldogs challenged him six times times. Four were batted down; one was stopped for a gain of 6 yards; one was a harmless incompletion.

His entire stat line looks like that too. The impact Kool-Aid is having is similar to that of PS2, but it has arrived a full year early. Surtain held opponents to a 29% completion rate. But where PS2 did it with elite position — and saw about 4 targets a game — Kool Aid is doing it with elite length, range, and on-ball skills. And he’s still only allowing a 31% completion rate against the nation’s 5th toughest schedule.

And 2023 saw much of the same. The kid makes half the field a no-fly zone.

And, like Patrick Surtain II, he won’t wow you with productivity numbers, but you’re going to have to scheme around him. The best offense in the country was reduced to doing so last year, if that tells you how much respect the Xs and Os folks have for him. He’s brash on the field, and cocky off it. But he can afford to be. He’s earned it.

His numbers won’t always show it, and his name won’t be heard over the PA, but that’s because he’s done his job. And the one thing you almost will never see is the back of his jersey.

That kind of safe, decade-long quality NFL starter is what I’d risk my job on, were I a GM, despite Terrion Arnold’s upside. What about you?