Getty Kitan Oladapo could have an instant impact for the Green Bay Packers.

The Green Bay Packers brought in a ton of players in the 2024 NFL Draft, but Day 3 pick Kitan Oladapo is projected to be a sleeper rookie to have an instant impact this season.

Bleacher Report’s Alex Ballentine broke down a handful of Day 3 picks who could be instant impact players. This list included some skill players like Javon Baker and Audric Estime. However, Ballentine also made sure to highlight Oladapo in Green Bay.

“Oladapo’s other competition is going to come from his fellow draftees,” Ballentine wrote. “There’s also the possibility of the 6’2″, 216-pound Oladapo being able to play as a de facto linebacker in sub-packages. There are a lot of ways he could get on the field, and his position group is relatively unproven outside of McKinney.”

With such a wide open safety room, Oladapo could find his way onto the field earlier than other Day 3 picks.

Kitan Oladapo Scouting Report

Even if he wasn’t a top safety prospect, there’s enough from Oladapo’s time at Oregon State to suggest he could have a role in the NFL.

Oladapo was a three-year starter for the Beavers. He finished his career with a second-team All-Pac-12 selection on a strong Oregon State team. In 55 career games, he racked up 15 tackles for loss, 6.5 sacks, two forced fumbles, three interceptions, and 23 pass breakups.

NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein was higher on Oladapo than where he was drafted. Along with a fourth-round grade, Zierlein compared the Packers rookie to Jaquiski Tartt.

“Oladapo possesses classic strong safety traits and play attributes, which should help evaluators define him more easily,” Zierlein wrote. “He’s likely to come in as a backup with special teams duties but has a pretty good shot of becoming an eventual starter.”

The film lines up with that evaluation. Oladapo has very good size at 6’2″ and 216 pounds. On top of that, he’s a reliable tackler with surprisingly good body control to come away with turnovers.

Oladapo still needs some polish to his game. However, he’s in a great position to develop while competing for playing time in Green Bay.

Green Bay’s New-Look Safety Room

The Packers will have almost an entirely new safety room in 2024. On top of that, they’ll have a new defensive coordinator in Jeff Hafley to set the secondary up for success.

Xavier McKinney was the team’s premiere free agent signing this offseason. The Packers signed him to a four-year, $68 million contract to make him one of the league’s highest-paid safeties.

McKinney will hold down one of the starting jobs. The rookies will be competing with second-year safety Anthony Johnson Jr. for the other spot. The Packers took three safeties in this year’s draft, but Javon Bullard will be the favorite to start alongside McKinney.

Bullard was a high-caliber player for Georgia the past couple of seasons. He’s a versatile playmaker with solid movement skills and good tackling ability despite his smaller frame. If Bullard holds down the other starting spot, then Oladapo will need to compete with former Oregon safety Evan Williams for a rotational role.

Regardless of who ends up starting, Packers fans are relieved that the team addressed a huge need at the safety position.

Xavier McKinney becoming available presented a ‘unique’ opportunity for Packers’ Brian Gutekunst

The sky is the limit for the 24-year-old safety, whose best years are still ahead of him.

It’s not often Brian Gutekunst is able—or even wants to—spend big in free agency.

The opportunity is always there, but the Green Bay Packers’ general manager always has to be cognizant of the ripple effect, saying, “You can do whatever you’d like, but there’s going to be consequences to that.”

Gutekunst, along with the rest of the league’s top executives and head coaches, are in Orlando, Florida, this week for the NFL owners’ meetings. He held a session with reporters that touched on just about anything and everything that has to do with the Packers’ triumphs and shortcomings from a season ago, as well as how they’re fortifying their roster to ensure they eclipse an NFC Championship Game in 2024—something they haven’t done in 14 years.

After Gutekunst swung for the fences with high-priority signings of running back Josh Jacobs and safety Xavier McKinney, there was a lot to talk about.

Jacobs and McKinney each signed four-year deals with the Packers that combined for $115 million dollars. It pales in comparison to the robust spending spree Gutekunst embarked on in the spring of 2019 when he brought aboard Adrian Amos, Billy Turner, Preston and Za’Darius Smith—four players who became immediate starters for a team that won 13 games in each of the following three campaigns.

While Jacobs is a former First Team All-Pro that allows the Packers to get younger in the backfield following the departure of Aaron Jones, McKinney is the real prize of the team’s compact free-agent class. At just 24 years old, McKinney was one of the best players available on the open market and Gutekunst knows just how rare it is that a player of his caliber is searching for his next opportunity.

“I think he’s a unique player to become available,” said Gutekunst, “he’s 24 years old, one of the top safeties in the game. A guy that can be a game-changing type of player. He really kind of fits what we’re looking for as a free agent—not only as a player but as a leader back there.”

A former second-round pick of the New York Giants, McKinney spent the first four seasons of his career playing in the Big Apple. While he’s shown the play-making ability Gutekunst and co. are enamored with, he’s missed 18 games, which is somewhat concerning for such a lucrative investment. However, only one of those injuries was football-related and it took place in the training camp ahead of his rookie season. He sustained a pedal fracture in his left foot and spent the majority of the season on injured reserve before making his NFL debut in a Nov. 29 game against the Cincinnati Bengals where he played just five snaps.

During the Giants’ bye week in 2022, McKinney had to have three fingers on his left hand surgically repaired during an ATV accident in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He still managed to return later that season, playing in the Giants’ penultimate regular-season game.

The following season, with his contract set to expire, McKinney responded by playing the best football fo his career. Opposing quarterbacks had a 52.1 passer rating when targeting him, according to Pro Football Focus. He was targeted a career-high 54 times across 17 starts, allowing a 61.1 completion rate; he tallied three interceptions and didn’t allow a single touchdown. 94 tackles also marked a career-high for McKinney and he missed just seven—or 5.7 percent—of his attempts.

For comparison’s sake, Darnell Savage, who has been the Packers’ starting safety for the past five seasons, missed 17.3 percent of his tackle attempts a season ago. He’s missed 12 or more tackles in each of the last three seasons with a career missed tackle rate of 17.4 percent.

The Packers didn’t retain Savage, instead allowing him to enter the unrestricted free-agent market and ultimately sign with the Jacksonville Jaguars. The same goes for Jonathan Owens and Rudy Ford, leaving the Packers essentially bare at the safety position. But with McKinney, the expectation is that he’ll wear a number of different hats for new defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley, whose scheme features a wide variety of Cover 1 and Cover 3 looks.

McKinney is a human Swiss Army knife—he’ll be weaponized at various levels of the field, from deep safety, the slot and even in the box where he’ll have the opportunity to defend against the run.

“His next three years should be the best football he plays, in our mind,” said Gutekunst.