Few players in college football displayed more niche dominance than Texas defensive tackle Alfred Collins in 2024. However, is his particular trump card valuable enough to be selected early in the 2025 NFL Draft? What does his scouting report have to say about it?
Alfred Collins’ Profile and Measurements
- Height: 6052
- Weight: 313
- Position: Defensive Tackle
- School: Texas
- Current Year: Senior (fifth Year)
Collins’ Scouting Report
Strengths
- Hands work inside to stack interior blockers with a natural length advantage
- Impressive grip strength, power, and violence to dissect blocks and pursue ball carriers in adjacent gaps
- Outrageous natural line-of-scrimmage-resetting potential
- Stacks blockers with a violent two-hand strike, grips hard, and discards them like a bouncer at the club
- Patient two-gap defender who sees through trash well and competes to disengage and finish ball carriers off his shoulder
- Quick eyes to look adjacent when the guard pulls
- Knows the center is coming down on him
- Jabs, stacks, and sheds to pursue power from the backside
- Impressive “hump” to discard and change direction quickly
- Long but dense lower half
- Proactive shucker versus smaller blockers to greet ball carrier at line
- Insanely quick processing trigger
- S-Tier run-defending potential
Weaknesses
- Not naturally swift horizontally to cut off reach blocks from O-line on his dome
- Crashes north/south and gets sealed easily
- Average first-step explosiveness
- Does not threaten interior offensive linemen’s shoulders as a pass rusher
- Occasionally caught with poor leverage versus doubles and is unable to drop anchor
- Bull-in-a-china-shop rusher with poor balance
- Unimpressive fluidity and horizontal explosiveness to make plays outside of his frame with consistency despite eye-catching length
- Early-down and short-yardage player providing almost no pass-rushing upside
- Might possess the worst pass-rush spin move I’ve ever seen
- Older prospect (will turn 24 during his rookie season)
Summary and Draft Projection
Collins is one of the best players in the 2025 NFL Draft. The Texas defensive tackle spent years playing in a heavy rotation of outrageous Longhorns defenders, including Byron Murphy II and T’Vondre Sweat, who were both top-50 picks in 2024.
Collins waited his turn to flash for the Longhorns as a starter, and his light shined bright down the stretch. Unfortunately, having those two previously drafted players fresh on the brain playing under the same defensive coordinator hurt Collins’ NFL outlook.
Although Sweat never came close to matching Murphy’s pass-rushing production, he flashed an impressive first step and some genuinely strong hands as a pass rusher, even at 360 pounds. He was likely never going to be a difference-maker at the NFL level, but he at least showed potential.
Collins … doesn’t. Despite 35-inch arms with an 82-inch wingspan, the Texas interior defender is a wet blanket on passing downs. There is no semblance of a rush plan, and for all of his practically unbelievable effectiveness, processing information, dissecting blocks, and hurling SEC guards across the field like a bail of hay does not translate at all.
Despite all of that, Collins still ended up being a top-25 player on my big board. Despite playing on an uneven field with a numerical grading scale weighted toward pass rush for draft value purposes, Collins’ current run defense form and still-to-be-realized potential elevated him to a very high grade.
Don’t for a second be fooled by his sub-330-pound frame, either. “Grown-man strength” doesn’t begin to describe the strike explosiveness or rotational force Collins produces. Heck, “dad strength” doesn’t even cover it. Being 340 pounds is not a prerequisite for being a sturdy run defender.
Does that mean he should be a first-round pick? No. I believe in my process, but it’s not perfect. But like Sweat, on a team with a stud pass rusher on the interior or two or three weapons on the line looking for a major uptick in second-level freedom and first-level playmaking versus the run, Collins is worth top-50 consideration.
The more likely outcome is that he lands somewhere late on Day 2 or into Day 3 because the league values potential as a rushing threat highly. He will be excellent value in that range.