Biggest risers from the 2022 college all-star events:
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Because the NFL added an extra week of regular season football, everything else was pushed back even further, so the first parts of the 2022 draft process has received even less media attention than normal.
Now that the Rams have been crowned as league champions, we enter the offseason, and for everybody who didn’t actually keep up with the NFLPA Collegiate Bowl, East-West Shrine game and Senior Bowl, I put together this list of prospects, who have boosted their stock over the course of those events.
So I have watched all the practices and the games from the past three weeks and picked the 15 prospects who I believe helped themselves the most with their performances. This group primarily includes Senior Bowl guys, who partially were called up from the NFLPA Bowl. While I actually watched every single rep of every single drill basically, I, unfortuantely, don’t have that kind of exclusive footage from the other two events.
Here’s the list I came up with:
Best 2022 NFL Draft Prospects
RB Dameon Pierce, Florida
As a former top-ten running back recruit (in 2018), expectations were high for this young man at Florida. Yet, while he was involved from the start and his production did increase throughout his career, his highest amount of touches came last year at just 119, even though he did manage to turn those into 790 yards and 16 touchdowns. The efficiency was there; unfortunately, during the Gators’ prolific 2020 season and last season, when they primarily were a rushing offense, Pierce never got the chance to be seen as a star.
Standing 5'9" and weighing in at 220 pounds, we expected power from this young man; instead, we got a couple of flashes of his violent running style in the actual games, dropping the shoulder on defenders and ripping through contact, in order to keep going. However, with wrap-tackling throughout practices, this event usually favors more of those fleet-footed scat backs, who can make larger defenders look bad in space. And still, I thought Pierce showed excellent short-area quickness on inside runs, while gaining speed through those one-step cuts on zone schemes, before showing the willingness to finish in a physical fashion with the way he approached contact.
As a receiver, he did actually drop a couple of passes on wheel routes – once in one-on-ones and in team drills each, where he seemed to have a bit of an issue with timing, specifically when to extend those hands as he tracked the ball over his shoulder – but his ability to give linebackers a little shake and hit an extra gear, to pull away from them vertically, was on display. And he excelled on angle routes, crossing up those defenders and showing the burst to pull away from them, once the ball was in his hands. And I also thought he was pretty impressive when he got in front of guys and held his ground against charging linebackers in pass-protection. In particular on day two – as they did at the end of Lions practices – he stone-walled App State linebacker D’Marco Jackson a couple of times.
I was pretty shocked when I realized Alabama’s Brian Robinson was voted American RB of the week over Pierce, but that was probably due more to the sheer visuals of the former just rocking Georgia LB Channing Tindal’s world at one point during pass-pro drills and having that best out-of-three at the end of that session, with everybody watching. Still, I would think no back shot up boards in Mobile quite like the often-underutilized Pierce, who had a complete all-around performance and projects a potential three-down option for most teams, I would think.