‘Hawks 3rd team to talk with Tide QB Young; other pro day updates … Interesting that Seattle has been identified as a 3rd team that met privately with Alabama QB Bryce Young over the course of the Tide’s pro day this week. Carolina and Las Vegas both met with Young last night with the Panthers getting to wine and dine him. As noted earlier, though, Young declined to get weighed again today after he had reportedly ‘bulked’ up to 204 for the combine. Young also opted not to run today, but he did go through a 50-pass scripted throwing session that by all accounts was very very good. And while its not necessarily a great comparative paradigm, in the clips we saw he just looked so much smoother and instinctive than CJ Stroud did yesterday at Ohio State. For the record, Alabama DE Will Anderson, one of the top 2-3 non-QB prospects for next month’s draft, if not the top one period, chose not to do anything all today another than show-up and cheer on his teammates. At the same time, we do believe CB Eli Ricks, who didn’t run at the combine, did in fact run today, but haven’t seen a time yet.
All but one team was represented at Utah’s pro day, but also didn’t get the chance to see TE Dalton Kincaid work out. Kincaid, who is in consideration to be the first player off the board at the position this year, was just cleared earlier this week to resume training after being sidelined since mid-season by a back injury. And right now it doesn’t appear as if Kincaid has any plans to workout prior to the draft, although he says he may invite some teams in to watch him run some routes. Among Utes who did work out, LB Mo Diabate, one of the more surprising combine snubs, turned in a couple of good leaps, including an 11-foot plus long jump, but there was no 40 time given.
All 32 teams had reps at the Cincinnati pro day including head coaches Zac Taylor of the home town Bengals and Mike Vrabel of Tennessee. LB Ivan Pace who didn’t run at the combine was credited with a 4.50 40 clocking by the school, but given that a couple of other Bearcats ran about a tenth faster than their combine times figure Pace ran somewhere in the 4.6 range. Still pretty good for a LB, although he is a little small at 5-10.5, 231.
It is going to be fascinating tomorrow to see if pretty much the same crowd that attended Stroud and Young’s workouts will stay on the road and go to the Kentucky pro day tomorrow where Will Levis will do his thing. Unfortunately, it appears we’ll get the same spotty coverage from the NFL Network which will be streaming Levis’ session starting around 1 PM ET. In fact, some teams could end up with real split scouting squads tomorrow as there will also be big-time pro days at Penn State and Notre Dame, along with Missouri, Houston, BYU and Boston College. In particular, we are really interested to see who attends the BC event where rising WR Zay Flowers will be the featured player. There does seem to be something of a consensus around the NFL that Ohio State’s Jaxon Smith-Njigba has emerged as the top receiver prospect this year, if his health indeed checks out after he missed all but three games with hamstring issues in 2022. But there are also some whispers that Flowers may very well have emerged as the #2 WR candidate. In fact, both New Orleans and the NY Giants reportedly got the jump on the crowd by taking Flowers out to dinner earlier this week.
