After months of pomp, circumstance and thousands of mock drafts, the 2025 NFL Draft is finally set to take place in Green Bay, Wisconsin, from Thursday to Saturday, April 24-26. Three Texas A&M football players will trade maroon threads for draft hats as they take the next steps on their football journeys.
Shemar Stewart, junior edge rusher
Stewart finally answers an oft-asked question — what would happen if you slapped a football helmet on a grizzly bear and set it loose on the field? Carnage, unrelenting effort and a whole lot of not really knowing what it’s doing.
To sell yourself on Stewart, who is more of an idea than a fully-fleshed-out player at this point, you have to believe in his rare physical gifts. At 6-foot-5, 257 pounds, Stewart’s testing numbers at the NFL Scouting Combine scored him the 10.00 in Kent Lee Platte’s relative athletic score — ranking him No. 1 of the 2,012 defensive ends at the Combine dating back to 1987. He is a figment of your imagination.
What’s preventing this Lovecraftian berserker from being a lock-top-five pick is simple: his lack of production. In his three years under the Kyle Field lights, Stewart amassed a measly 4.5 sacks. However, if an NFL team is willing to wade into the waters of analytics, it will see that Stewart found other ways to affect the game.
Racking up 39 pressures, the most of anyone on the A&M squad, the Miami product used his raw power to penetrate the line, even when he wasn’t able to finish the play by getting the quarterback on the ground. Additionally, coach Mike Elko’s scheme focuses predominantly on his pass rushers battening down the hatches and playing contain on the quarterback, limiting true pin-his-ears-back pass rushing reps for Stewart.
“I think sack production — you know the way those kids impact games — is immeasurable,” Elko said at A&M’s NFL Pro Day. “I don’t think you can just look at sack numbers. … I know the NFL sees that. I think if you asked offensive coaches in the SEC the impact those kids had on games, I think they would probably tell you it’s a little bit more than just the stat numbers.”
This is not to say that Stewart will be an ace pass rusher immediately. In fact, he’s far from it. With a pass rush win rate of under 12.5%, the edge falls notably under the typical threshold for first-round prospects.
His lack of development in his rush plan stunts his ability to counter an initial punch by a blocker, and when his bull rush fails, he’s left flailing. Stewart also boasts a 26.9% missed tackle rate in college, which is astronomically high. Some teams will view this as a positive, an opportunity for sacks left on the field, while others will view him as an out-of-control athlete in need of too much technical refinement.
Despite the questions, Stewart will undoubtedly be a first-round pick thanks to hall of fame coach Bill Parcells’ “Planet Theory,” which says that there simply aren’t many humans on Earth this large and this athletic. Stewart’s pocket collapsing capabilities are real, and you can feel them on tape, but he needs a smart, patient team who will put the pieces of the puzzle together. If he lands with a well-run team like the Baltimore Ravens or Pittsburgh Steelers, Pro Bowls are absolutely in his future.
Nic Scourton, junior edge rusher
If the rock upon which Stewart builds his football church is God-given physical gifts, Scourton’s is built on production and effort. After a 10-sack season for the Purdue Boilermakers in 2023, the Bryan kid came home and tallied five sacks and 14.5 tackles for loss in a First Team All-SEC campaign.
Scourton stands just under 6-foot-3 and is planning to play at around 265 pounds at the next level, a stark dropoff from his 285-pound playing weight in his lone season for the Maroon and White. This sudden weight change is likely a way to optimize his average athletic tools to best serve a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none skillset.
Deployed as a screamer off the edge in Elko’s defense, Scourton flashes a bag of pass-rush moves to harass quarterbacks. Scourton uses his go-to spin move maybe a tick more often than he should, but he frequently Tasmanian Devils his way into pressures. He also has moments of being able to “run the hoop” and bend the corner on offensive tackles.
The barrel-chested defensive end’s lack of power or speed mostly show up once his initial pass-rush move gets stymied by his blocker. Scourton frequently fails to chain together counter moves to overcome a quick loss and solely relies on effort to make his presence felt.
Luckily for Scourton, his motor never runs cold. Finishing tied for second in the Southeastern Conference in TFLs, Scourton hunts down plays from the backside to slam cutback lanes shut. His toughness stands out at the point of attack, as he refuses to be blocked by anybody smaller than him and will anchor down when he needs to.
As one of the youngest players in the class at only 20 years and six months old, Scourton is in prime position to get snaps right away at the next level. Adding the Bryan product to an already-dynamic defensive line will allow him to bring his no-nonsense stoutness to the next level. Teams like the New England Patriots and San Francisco 49ers make sense on Day 2.
Shemar Turner, senior defensive tackle
For better and for worse, Turner treats every defensive snap like it’s his last time on a football field.
Turner’s 6-foot-3, 290-pound frame was tailor-made to play as a 3-technique. On passing downs, Turner is a ball of flaming machetes that pierces through the offensive line in a blink with a swim move to pants the guard across from him. But like his fellow Aggies in this draft class, the ability to break down and win the play with a sack is still a work in progress.
The pop in his hands would make his childhood idol, Ray Lewis, proud, and that power shows up most frequently against the run. Turner has good eyes and uses his leverage to stack and shed in the run game to force splash plays. He will occasionally hunt after big plays and leave his assigned gap barren, but you live with the occasional chunk run if he is making plays consistently.
It is important to note that Turner plays like he absolutely hates his opponent. He tackles hard and plays through the echo of the whistle. Unfortunately, this can sometimes result in him uppercutting the groin of an opponent, but competitive fire and desire are infectious.
After a stress fracture injury that sidelined Turner for the majority of the pre-Draft process, the big hoss from DeSoto is now likely to be a Day 2 selection. His role as an energy guy in an interior-line rotation, similar to how the Kansas City Chiefs used Tershawn Wharton, should give him mass appeal to NFL decision makers.
