Yesterday I kicked off my look at this year’s draft prospects with a look at Northwestern’s Peter Skoronski. Skoronski is one of the three consensus top tackle prospects in this draft, so today I figured we'd take a look at another one of those top three prospects. Georgia tackle Broderick Jones is widely seen as one of the other top three tackle prospects alongside Skoronski and Ohio State’s Paris Johnson Jr. Jones is coming off the back of an impressive performance at the combine where he measured in at 6-foot-5, 311 pounds with nearly 35-inch arms and posted various strong athletic testing scores in the drills on the field.
When watching Jones, the athleticism jumps off the screen. He’s a very fluid athlete with the ability to not only run quickly in a straight line, but he’s also agile enough to change direction without losing much speed. This enables him to do tasks that a lot of other offensive lineman simply can’t do.
This play in the national championship game against TCU is the perfect example of his athletic ability. Georgia calls a tunnel screen to the slot receiver to the left of the formation. Jones lines up at left tackle and is asked to work all the way across the field and block the defensive back aligned over the slot receiver. That’s an insane amount of ground to expect an offensive tackle to be able to cover and very few actually could do it, but Jones does a terrific job showing off his athletic ability to get across the field and make the block to allow the receiver time to cut back inside. Yes, you can point out that the defender spins out of the block and stays on his feet, but Jones did enough to prevent him from making the tackle, which is what's most important.
That athletic ability is rare from an offensive lineman. Very few offensive tackles could pull off that type of block, which makes Jones an enticing prospect. Because of that athletic ability, Jones can be used in a variety of different ways and open up some new schemes for the offense.
Here we have a combination of a crack toss play, but instead of the ball being tossed to the running back, it’s given to a receiver on a jet sweep. Still, the concept of the play remains the same. The tight ends and receivers align tight to the left of the formation and block down inside to pin the edge defenders inside, allowing Jones to pull around to the edge and act as the lead blocker for the jet sweep. This requires an athletic tackle to pull off effectively and Jones obviously suits the job well. He has no troubles pulling to the edge and getting out in front of the runner while remaining in control. He spots the receivers on the outside making solid blocks, so his eyes work inside and he locates a defender working across from the back side, so he works inside and blocks that defender to keep the lane clear for the runner. Jones then finishes the block nicely, driving the defender to the ground as the receiver runs freely down the sideline.
Jones has the potential to be a real weapon in the run game with the amount he can do athletically. There’s not really a limit to what types of schemes an offense can run with that type of athletic ability at left tackle, which is a huge plus for any team that drafts Jones. Another huge plus is that his athletic ability translates to pass protection too.
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