Chad Muma profile: Why the Jacksonville Jaguars drafted the linebacker in the 2022 NFL Draft
The Jacksonville Jaguars picked Chad Muma with the 70th pick in the 2022 NFL draft.
Chad Muma's Strengths:
A lightly recruited three-star athlete in 2018, Muma increased his production in each of his four seasons with the Cowboys. He put up crazy numbers as a senior, 142 tackles, eight for loss and three interceptions, with two returned to the house. That earned him a third-team All-American honors, along with being a back-to-back first-team All-Mountain West pick.
This is an instinctive playmaker who operates about as fast as any linebacker in this class. What stands out is that he consistently has his shoulders parallel to the line of scrimmage in run defense. He has that quick acceleration in tight areas to beat linemen to the spot or leverage the ball, as run schemes develop and subsequently shoot down once he sees an opportunity.
His ability to track the ball behind the line of scrimmage is outstanding. You constantly see him crashing through the reach of blockers to one side and fighting through contact to get to the ball. When he arrives there, he can put the hit stick on guys in the hole.
Muma has the explosion to be stacked over a guard and chase down a bubble screen to the number three in trips to his side. He can also cut off the angle to the sideline on fly sweeps and force the ball-carrier to redirect, at least being able to hold him up until the rest of his troops arrive there.
He has that natural understanding for leverage and where the rest of the defense is lined up, with how aggressive he is with his angles and he will switch back and forth with shuffling or at least pacing himself on the fly.
Muma’s pursuit from behind, when he has to redirect against RPOs/screen alerts after stepping down initially, is eye-popping. You see him deliver some licks on guys, who have to slow down momentarily and he catches up on them.
During the Senior Bowl week, he confirmed with how much ease he was flowing sideways with some of the high-level open-field tackles he made.
Wyoming told their D-ends to crash inside on the backside of those zone schemes, which made Muma the de facto contain defender and you see him quickly get to the outside of the last man at the line and then flatten down the line, to get initial contact for TFLs or minimal yardage.
When quarterbacks pull the ball on bootlegs, Muma takes a straight angle to cut off the path for those guys to actually pivot all the way around, arriving at the passer just as he’s trying to look downfield. The guys he was running at routinely flipped the ball out to somebody in the flats and already turned their bodies away from the hit. That translates pretty directly to what he can do as a blitzer, especially coming off the edge. When he’s rushing up one of the inside gaps, you see the effort to fight through and ultimately get home.
In the passing game, Muma can cover plenty of ground on diagonal shuffles in hook drops, yet when he ends up matched up with somebody working down the seams, he can turn and carry them vertically as well. On his tape, he routinely denies lay-ups in the flats to his side, usually putting those guys on their behinds.
When backs wheel it up the sideline against him, he also has that secondary burst to not allow vertical separation. Wyoming pulled Muma over number three receiver in trips sets and he sat down over hook routes.
He can sink between two receivers stemming vertically, to give his safety more time to read the pattern, before driving down on check-downs underneath or the quarterback scrambling towards the sideline. His ability to get out of a sideways shuffle and back underneath deep crossers off play-action is freaky.
Chad Muma's weaknesses:
With that being said, at times Muma trusts his eyes a little too much and his reads were more like a typical SAM backer, going C-gap out, rather than processing information from that inside triangle like a MIKE would, which most people project him to play at the next level.
You see his pads get rocked back a few times when H-backs work across and hit him on an angle. As he triggers down against the ball going wide, he can get a little overzealous and slip off tackles. You wouldn’t want him in a lot of off-man coverage against anybody detached from the line of scrimmage, because he tends to get too far on his heels as the guy in front of him stems vertically.
When Muma is blitzing through one of the inside gaps, he has to do a better job of slapping away the hands of blockers and getting through (fairly) clean. A lot of his rushes tend to stall or at least get slowed down a lot.
Conclusion on Chad Muma:
There are a lot of parallels between Muma and fellow Wyoming linebacker Logan Wilson, who is starting to get some recognition with the Bengals now. However, this year’s Cowboy prospect doesn’t project as cleanly to the MIKE spot as Wilson, because he played a lot more on the edge and we’ll have to see if he can learn to read in-between the tackles as well. From an ability to move in space and chase the ball perspective, Muma is more impressive. His 40 time was slightly below-average among fast LB group, but he was top-four among all other events and looked really smooth during the positional work.
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