Former Tennessee football edge rusher Darrell Taylor was the first Volunteers player taken in the 2020 NFL Draft. The Seattle Seahawks selected him.
He didn’t make it into the first round, but Darrell Taylor’s NFL Draft stock improved enough for him to be the highest Tennessee football player taken since Derek Barnett in 2017. And like Barnett, he was likely taken for his ability to rush the passer.
The Seattle Seahawks traded up, giving the New York Jets their second and third round picks, to take the defensive end and outside linebacker in the second round of the virtual draft with the 48th overall pick. There had been numerous rumors of Seattle leaning towards Taylor for a while, so it wasn’t shocking that they would take him.
With the pick, Taylor becomes Tennessee football’s first second-rounder taken in the NFL Draft since Justin Hunter was taken by the Tennessee Titans way back in 2013. As a result, he’s got some high expectations now.
Taylor’s recent rise in his draft stock was somewhat shocking. The 6’4″ 267-pound edge rusher just recently revealed he played all of 2019 with a stress fracture in his shin, and he missed the combine because he had to have surgery to clean it up.
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Missing the combine and such injury issues would seem to hurt somebody’s draft stock. For Taylor, however, it improved. Rather than look at his injury concerns, scouts saw that he still managed to register eight and a half sacks last year and 10 tackles for a loss with that injury. He has had at least eight sacks and double-digit tackles for a loss two years in a row.
Although Taylor showed he could play in a nickel-based 4-3 as a defensive end, which he did for two years under Bob Shoop, most of his productivity was as an outside linebacker in Jeremy Pruitt’s and Derrick Ansley’s 3-4 schemes. How that translates to the Seahawks, who run a 4-3 under with Pete Carroll and defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr. could be tricky.
Typically, the Seahawks have looked for players who are great at a specific role on defense. Taylor’s selling point would appear to be his versatility. However, if any organization knows how to develop NFL defensive players, it’s the Seahawks, so they should be trusted. All in all, this seems like a pretty solid landing spot for Taylor.