NFL scouting combine risers and fallers: LB/DL | DB/TE | QB/RB/WR | OL
INDIANAPOLIS — The 2026 NFL combine, my 18th, is now in the books. And we have a little bit of everything coming out of the week on the ground in the Circle City.
My overarching thought on this year’s draft class actually relates to the Lions’ 2023 draft class. Follow me on this one.
Three years ago, Detroit GM Brad Holmes and coach Dan Campbell stunned the NFL world by taking running back Jahmyr Gibbs with the 12th pick and off-ball linebacker Jack Campbell with the 18th selection. The conversation wasn’t that the Lions got bad players. Rather, it was that, amid a league becoming increasingly focused on players at premium positions, particularly in the first round of the NFL draft, Detroit’s approach was entirely different.
Gibbs is now a three-time Pro Bowler, and Campbell made first-team All-Pro in 2025.
Meanwhile, the premium-position guys available at the time to the Lions in that range show what sort of crapshoot the draft can be: Edge rushers Lukas Van Ness and Will McDonald IV, tackle Broderick Jones, corners Emmanuel Forbes Jr., Christian Gonzalez and Deonte Banks, and receivers Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Quentin Johnston, Zay Flowers and Jordan Addison. Maybe Detroit would’ve ended up with Gonzalez or JSN instead. Maybe not.
Either way, Gibbs and Campbell were the best football players on the board for the Lions, and strong cultural fits for their program. The same went for tight end Sam LaPorta and tweener DB Brian Branch, whom the Lions landed in the second round.
So how do those four Detroit picks relate to this year’s draft? Think of Notre Dame do-everything back Jeremiyah Love, Ohio State off-ball linebacker Sonny Styles and all-world safety Caleb Downs, or even Oregon’s uber-athletic tight end Kenyon Sadiq. All of them are really good football players, and probably surer things than some of the tackles, edge guys and receivers that’ll be selected around them in this year’s draft.
And when those guys are sitting there on the board in late April, it’ll be interesting to see if teams heed the lessons that the Lions’ 2023 draft class could give all of them.
The combine is now done. And that means that draft season is in full swing, with pro days kicking off this week (Wisconsin’s is Friday).
So we’re going to start this week with a few impressions of the college prospects from Indianapolis:
• Where Styles lands is going to be fascinating. I’d think John Harbaugh is going to love the Ohio State star, and maybe enough for the Giants to take him at No. 5. The Commanders might be in play at No. 7, with Styles carrying the length and athleticism that Dan Quinn has long coveted at the position. What seems apparent already, though, is that his wait probably won’t be too long in the first round on April 23, after the show he put on over the past few days.
• Scouts expected Sadiq to be a star in Indy, and he absolutely delivered. His 4.39 40-yard dash was the second-fastest ever by a tight end. He posted jumps of 43.5" in the vertical and 11’ 2" in the broad. He had 26 reps of 225 pounds on the bench press. He has a Shannon Sharpe-type build at 6’ 3" and 239 pounds. But he’s a willing blocker and will project nicely into a Brock Bowers-type role for someone.
• The quarterback class is what it is, but I think two guys really helped themselves. One was Arkansas’s Taylen Green, who posted the best vertical (43.5") and broad (11’ 2") jumps by a quarterback in combine history, and the second-fastest 40 (4.36) ever by a quarterback in Indy. The other was Georgia Tech’s Haynes King, who had the sixth-fastest 40 (4.46) by a quarterback ever and third-fastest three-cone-drill time (6.89) at the combine, regardless of position (which makes King, an ultra-productive collegian, even more intriguing).
• A couple of safeties really helped themselves—Arizona’s Treydan Stukes, with the 4.33 40 that he clocked, and Oregon’s Dillon Thieneman, with the all-around show he put on. The Purdue transfer posted a 4.35 in the 40, a 41-inch vertical, and a 10’ 5" broad jump, which put him in the first-round conversation as the class’s presumptive second safety behind Downs.
• There was a shot coming into Indy that the Notre Dame duo of Jeremiyah Love (who, as expected, crushed it) and Jadarian Price could be the only backs drafted before Day 3. The events of Saturday might’ve changed that, with Arkansas’s 6’ 1", 223-pound late-bloomer Mike Washington Jr. blazing a 4.33. Washington bounced from Buffalo to New Mexico State, never rushing for even 750 yards in a season, over his first four years in college before busting loose for 1,070 yards on a 6.4-yard-per-carry average in his first/only SEC season.
• The story of Bryce Lance (Trey’s little brother) is a good one, too. He took some time to develop at North Dakota State, but broke out in his fourth (75 catches, 1,071 yards, 17 TDs) and fifth (51 catches, 1,079 yards, eight TDs) seasons, and ran 4.34 on Saturday at 6’ 3" and 204 pounds. His collegiate background and physical traits could evoke some comparisons going forward to Packers WR Christian Watson, another former Bison.
• A prospect who will become a factor in the coming months is Utah left tackle Caleb Lomu, who’s still a bit raw but bursting with potential. That potential is why likely top-10 pick Spencer Fano stayed on the right side for the Utes. And it showed up in the 6’ 6", 313-pounder clocking a 4.99 40-yard dash, and 32.5-inch vertical in Indy.
I had a good conversation with GM Brandon Beane the other day about Buffalo’s new coach, Joe Brady, except for the familiarity factor in his hire. If you remember, a few weeks ago, we wrote about how the Buffalo brass told Brady that they wanted him to treat the interview as if he were coming in “as an assistant from the Green Bay Packers.”
The idea was to see what they didn’t know about who Brady would be as a head coach.
The result was even better than anyone would’ve expected.
“Joe was here, and Brian Daboll was here. I knew a couple of the people before,” Beane told me. “It was like, Everyone, walk into this room with the people we have in there that were part of the interview committee, as if we've never met you. Tell us how you grew up? What’s your family life like? How’d you get to whatever college? How did you start your career? We did every one of those like that. And I say that because I thought that was the fairest way. It’s like you want this trial to be in another place because you want the jury’s head to be clear.
“You don’t want anything preconceived; you try to do the best you can. And I think that’s Joe’s mindset. It’s like, Hey, we’re gonna have new signage. This is gonna be like I just went to a new team, like I just came from the Green Bay Packers. It’s not just passing the baton from Sean McDermott to him. It’s like, Hey, I’m the new coach. This is how we’re going to do things.”
Already, there’s some signage going up, and new elements around the facility that should catch the eye of the players who’ll be held over from last year’s Bills. The schedule will be tweaked, with input from team leaders. Training camp practices might not be the same. “It’s going to be the same physical location,” Beane said, “but I think it’s going to feel different.”
Of course, with all of that comes some unique challenges.
One is that all the returning players know Brady, and the guys on defense may have seen him as more of a buddy, since he wasn’t coaching them directly. Those guys will have to adjust to the way they see him, and it’s not like you can snap your fingers and suddenly change the way you approach a person.
The good news is that Brady’s been there before, albeit on a smaller scale. He was promoted to interim offensive coordinator, from quarterbacks coach, 10 games into the 2023 season. So Buffalo saw him go from working tangentially with the running backs, receivers, tight ends and linemen to, at the drop of a hat, being their boss and getting them on the same page. That Bills team, by the way, went 6–1 after a 5–5 start.
“For the quarterback coach, coaching three guys, to go coach the whole 20-something guys within the whole offense, in the middle of the season, that’s not easy,” Beane said. “So now you go from being buddies with Ed Oliver, to you’re in charge of Ed Oliver, Greg [Rousseau], the guys on defense. And the cool thing about Josh [Allen] is that Josh and Joe have a relationship all the way back to being just quarterback coach, offensive coordinator, but Josh respects the seat that Joe’s in. He doesn’t try to take advantage.
“And I think the offensive guys will do that as well, knowing he’s over the whole team. And so we’ve at least seen him do that. He understands what comes with that.”
All of it was part of the “CEO” equation, which, more than anything else, is the area where Beane and the guys on the committee wanted someone to come in and win the job. It just so happened that the guy who did had his Zoom interview from his own office inside their team facility, while everyone else was on their laptops in Florida.
In the end, what matters is who Brady was (which the Bills were able to see over four years) as an assistant, and more so, who he’ll be from here. And in his final game as a coordinator, the Bills actually got to see both—in how he took personal accountability for a loss in which his unit scored 30 points, despite five turnovers. It’d have been easy for the OC to say his side had done enough. But, even privately, he didn’t do that.
“And that’s what he truly believes,” Beane said. “Some people say it. But you feel that with Joe—I’ve been with Joe after games that we lost, and one could argue maybe our offense kept us in the game, or we didn’t get enough stops. And Joe’s like, We could’ve done more.”
After seven consecutive playoff appearances, a string of five AFC East titles, and two AFC title game appearances, it’s going to be hard for Brady to do more in this case. But it’s fair to say, based on all this, he won’t shy from the challenge.
Which is what the Bills were looking for.
I’d lean toward a Maxx Crosby trade happening, and maybe this week. But there’s going to have to be some needle-threading. I don’t think the Raiders want to go through the song-and-dance of shopping him, nor do I believe Crosby wants it advertised that he’s looking for suitors, given his bond with owner Mark Davis, and his view of himself as a Raider.
So what would be the cleanest for everyone is for a market to emerge organically. And that could happen, given that most teams are going to start spending to their cap and cash budgets, and filling roster spots a week from now.
Vegas, to be sure, isn’t going to give Crosby away. I also believe, though, that it’d be difficult to find the haul that the Raiders got for Khalil Mack eight years ago, or what Dallas got for Micah Parsons last year, or what the Dolphins received for Laremy Tunsil in 2019. All of those guys were traded for packages fronted by two first-round picks. All of those guys were also much younger, nearing the ends of their rookie deals.
Crosby—who has built a good working relationship with GM John Spytek, has had good interaction with new coach Klint Kubiak and is close with recently promoted defensive coordinator Rob Leonard—will turn 29 in August. He has seven NFL seasons under his belt. He ended the past two seasons bound for surgery. Now, no one does more to keep himself physically fit than Crosby. But these factors will all have to be considered.
There’s also logic to the idea that it’s time for Crosby, who very badly wants to win, and the team, to move on. The Raiders will almost certainly have a rookie quarterback playing in the fall, and it could take a year or two to get the roster to where it needs to be. Would Crosby still be in his prime then? Would the Raiders be able to get the same price a year or two from now that they might bring home this week?
These are the questions the Raiders will have to ask themselves, weighing keeping one of the NFL’s best players against having more capital to build a team that Fernando Mendoza has a great chance to grow with.
