The tape measures and stopwatches are out — and the world’s strangest job interview is entering its final stages.
As the 2025 NFL Draft creeps ever closer, 13 Aggies will take one final opportunity to impress scouts, coaches and personnel executives at Texas A&M football’s NFL Pro Day on Thursday, March 27 at the Coolidge Performance Center.
“[The Pro Day] is an opportunity for a lot of our guys to come back and really put on a show [on Thursday],” coach Mike Elko said. “I’m excited to watch those guys. That’s a day they’ve waited for and looked forward to for a long time, so it’s been good to see some of those guys filtering back into town. We had a bunch of them out at practice on Saturday.”
For the players who didn’t get invited to the NFL Scouting Combine, like senior defensive back BJ Mayes, the event will be a showcase for their athleticism, which is often the tiebreaker for teams between similarly-graded prospects on Day 3 of the draft.
The Aggies are expected to be officially measured, participate in athletic testing — including running the 40-yard dash — and take part in position-specific field drills in front of the NFL contingent.
After junior defensive end Shemar Stewart stole the headlines and the hearts of talent evaluators with a jaw-dropping performance at the 2025 NFL Scouting Combine, it is unlikely that the Miami native will take part in physical testing.
At the Combine in Indianapolis in February, Stewart left the Lucas Oil Stadium turf scorched in his wake as he blazed to a 4.59-second 40-yard dash at 267 pounds. Lunacy. He also nearly scraped his head on the retractable roof with a 40-inch vertical leap.
The final and often missing piece to Stewart’s puzzle, to the consternation of the 12th Man and draftniks alike, has been raw pass-rush production. Despite near-mythological physical gifts, the defensive end only recorded 1.5 sacks in his final season under the Kyle Field lights.
Teams will put the defender through a barrage of pass-rush drills at the Pro Day to test his technical refinement, hand placement and bend. Also crucial for Stewart is the opportunity to speak with the teams interested in him. For someone who has been hailed as a developmental prospect, coaches would love to be able to see how malleable and receptive to coaching he is in the controlled environment.
As reported in January by NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, Stewart’s namesake, senior defensive tackle Shemar Turner, will participate after being sidelined from the Combine and the Reese’s Senior Bowl due to a stress fracture in his leg that he played through during the 2024 season.
Turner is not nearly the adonis that Stewart is from a this-guy-was-put-on-this-Earth-to-play-football perspective, but he has a better understanding of leverage and the nuances of rushing the passer and plays with a red-hot motor.
“There’s nobody on our football team that loves football more than Shemar Turner,” former coach Jimbo Fisher said in 2023. “He loves to play, he loves to practice, he loves to work out, he loves to run, he loves everything associated with football, and that doesn’t always happen.”
Junior edge rusher Nic Scourton will fully participate in drills and testing after electing to only do measurements and interviews in Indy. Scourton’s 40-yard dash and agility drills are important for him to demonstrate the fluidity he showed at Purdue before he transferred.
At the Combine, Scourton measured in at 257 pounds, a far cry from his listed weight at 285 pounds at A&M. The Bryan native appears to have dropped to the weight he played at when he recorded 12 sacks in two years for the Boilermakers, making his explosiveness numbers key for determining where he aligns in the NFL.
Despite the pass rushers being the only consensus draftable players, Mayes has booked a 30 visit with the Indianapolis Colts. Considered to have a priority free agent grade from NFL teams, Mayes could work his way into the later rounds of the draft if he gets over the necessary athletic thresholds on Thursday.
Despite the 40-yard dashes taking no more than five seconds, the Pro Day is the culmination of years of hard work and the final test to determine which players will take the next step in their football careers.
