Dawuane Smoot   DL/ER   Illinois  

TALENT
ROUND
2

STRENGTHS
Dawuane has a lot of hidden talent. He has the size, length and overall athletic talent to play more than one position on your defensive line. He shows excellent effort on every play and never stops until he hears the whistle. Dawuane shows the foot speed and agility to rush the passer and should be an excellent defensive lineman playing in a 2 gap system or a gap system. Dawuane because of his classic size and length should be able to play defensive end in a 4/3 defense and that means not every team in the NFL will think Dawuane is a fit for their defense unless he shows them differently at the combine.

CONCERNS
Dawuane has the classic size and length and shows excellent effort but he is very far behind in the techniques and truthfully I have to wonder why. He struggles to disengage from blockers on every down and distance. It doesn’t matter if he is rushing the passer or playing the run Dawuane seems to struggle getting off blocks. All of his success at the college level is because of his effort and athletic talent so the thought of him learning better techniques is exciting. Because of his struggles to get off blocks he tries to guess and gets out of position to make tackles and loses gap control. Dawuane also has to improve reading blocks and identify were the ball is. He is trying so hard to get rid of his block that his head is down and his arms are tied up and he misses making a lot of plays because of this.

BOTTOM LINE
If you’re going to select Dawuane be ready for him to take some time to develop. I don’t know how fast you can get him on the field even as a rotation lineman because he struggles getting off blocks so much and you have wonder if he truly has ever had the correct coaching? It looks to me like Dawuane has taken all of his techniques from other players with different talents than he has. It’s the sign of coaching trying to fit the player to a system rather than coaching techniques to fit a player’s talent. I like his effort on every play and that tells me that Dawuane has excellent potential and upside to improve and play more consistently and better than he did in college.

Drew Boylhart  MAR.2017