Saturday 17 April 2010

POTD: Chad Jones, S, LSU


By Kip Earlywine

Height: 6'3"
Weight: 230 lbs
40 time: 4.57



This will be all for the safety coverage from me before the draft. I wanted to take a look at Larry Asante and Barry Church, but I couldn't find enough video and I'm starting to get crunched for time (I still have a lot of linemen to cover). If you missed it, I covered Reshad Jones a few days ago.

I'm not going to go in much detail with Chad Jones, but the quick and dirty is that he's a bit like a slower Taylor Mays and is considered to be a bit of a project pick. I'm going mostly off of a bunch of scouting reports I read, but here's the synopsis:

Despite his huge size and below average speed, Jones actually played free safety at LSU, although a move to strong safety is likely in his future due to his good ability vs. the run and his inability to cover large amounts of ground in coverage.

Jones isn't totally raw and already has some NFL ready skills, one of them being that he's a very good open field tackler, and he's a pretty good hitter. He's not awful in coverage, its just arriving in coverage that can sometimes be a problem.

Jones was a two sport star at LSU, and is regarded as an incredible athlete. His ceiling is pretty high, and that might cause him to go surprisingly early in the draft. It also makes Jones an attractive SS candidate for GM John Schneider who seems to fall in the "tools" side of the GM preference spectrum (with Tim Ruskell being on the "polish/intangibles" side).

Expect him to be drafted in... round 2-3

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