'Positionless' draft prospects make me nervous

Or why I'm not sold on Cooper DeJean to the Seahawks: Seaside Joe 1872

Sometimes in football the word ‘versatile’ just means that you have failed to win a starting job at one more than one position. Instead of a backup who only got beat out once, the ‘positionless chess piece’ has lost multiple times.

Is that truly an asset that teams should target in the first round?

As you’re perusing, reading, consuming, watching, digesting, and listening to draft content about 2024 prospects—almost all of which will only prepare you for that player’s BEST CASE SCENARIO at the next level—it’s worth going back and remembering how we do this to ourselves every year. We believe that of the 32 players picked in the first round, 32 will do what they’re expected to do in the NFL. In reality, fewer than half of first round picks will play anything like expected and there is no such thing as a “high floor”.

Many “high floor” prospects have come to find out that the easiest player to replace on a roster is the jack-of-all-trades, master of none: The one who had so many roles he could potentially fill, if all else failed. I think in the first round, especially at pick 16 where the Seahawks are, I’d rather just know exactly what position Seattle is addressing instead of picking “a moveable chess piece”.

(I may be a checkers guy but aren’t all chess pieces ‘moveable’?)

Would you rather come to a fight with a swiss army knife or a machete?

One prospect in the 2024 draft who gives me the vibes of being too complete to fail—and therefore he could—is Iowa cornerback Cooper DeJean, a player who was in Seattle for a visit with the Seahawks this week. I like DeJean—a lot—but similar to Washington tackle Troy Fautanu, another prospect I’m fond of as a football player, I am hesitant to endorse Seattle picking a player in the first round who they have to start moving around the field immediately.

You don’t have to pick a moveable chess piece when there are Queens still on the board.

Isaiah linebacker, You-say-a safety?

In 2020, one of the hottest draft commodities in the NFL world was Clemson “chess piece” Isaiah Simmons. He had “too many good qualities” to fail and the fact that GMs didn’t know what position he should play was billed as a positive trait instead of a negative. With hindsight (and Simmons is far from the first or the last) can’t we all agree now that Simmons’ lack of defensive identity proved to be problematic for the Arizona Cardinals?

Simmons played linebacker, safety, and cornerback for the national champion Clemson Tigers and analysts all seemed to agree that he could be slotted in any of those roles in the NFL and be not only effective, but elite. In ESPN’s 2020 draft reaction with Mina Kimes, Field Yates, etc., you would think that Arizona just picked Troy Polamalu AND Ray Lewis:

Simmons has one of the most insane NFL.com/Next Gen Stats pages in history, as he ranked first in production score (99) and first in athleticism score (99) in the 2020 draft class. And that was just among linebackers, Simmons could have probably ranked first among corners and safeties too.

Those combine numbers are reminiscent of Vernon Davis, but in a defensive player. In his final college season, Simmons had 104 tackles, eight sacks, 16.5 tackles for a loss, two forced fumbles, eight pass deflections, and three interceptions. Even looking back on his 2020 pre-draft campaign again, I’m at a loss for words as to how Isaiah Simmons has failed so majorly in the NFL.

But I think it just comes back to the fact that the Cardinals didn’t know who they were getting other than they picked the best athlete on the best team, similar to Georgia’s Travon Walker going first in 2022. Not to discredit Simmons’ resume as a top-10 pick because I think it was earned, but I would say that if he was only being judged at one position instead of three then it’s OBVIOUS that he wouldn’t have been the highest-ranked linebacker, corner, or safety.

Yet NFL.com compared him to Shaquille Leonard, arguably the best linebacker in the NFL at the time, and ESPN compared him to Derwin James, arguably the best safety, when he was picked by Arizona. I’ll queue up the moment that the Cardinals drafted him here, but what I want you to see is this:

“He’s like Derwin James”—he played 218 snaps at safety!

“He’s like Darius/Shaq Leonard”—he played 121 snaps at inside linebacker!

That’s nothing! How can we adequately judge any player based on 3-5 games worth of snaps? This is the whole argument against J.J. McCarthy right now, that he’s getting credit for snaps he hasn’t played. Will he be just as good or better (he needs to be a lot better) when he gets those additional snaps?

Simmons got the time and he was worse at every position, not better.

“If nothing else, he’d be a great slot corner”—You picked a slot corner in the top-10? (Oh wait, if I’m the Seahawks I can’t criticize doing that.)

“Versatility”, “Moveable Chess Piece”, “Positionless”—These were points 1, 2, and 3 when it came to Isaiah Simmons in 2020 and many thought that he “FELL” to pick eight, meaning he could have been a top-five or top-three pick. Instead, the Cardinals would have been better off drafting Clemson teammate A.J. Terrell, who is/was an outside cornerback. As the 16th overall pick, Terrell had his fifth-year option picked up by the Falcons and is looking for an extension near the top of the cornerback market.

Simmons played three seasons with the Cardinals, mostly at linebacker, and he even had the same defensive coordinator (Vance Joseph) the entire time. So disappointing were the returns that Arizona traded Simmons to the Giants for a seventh round pick and he saw his playing time drop from 896 snaps to 377 snaps with defensive coordinator Wink Martindale, a so-called ‘guru’ for positionless football players, including Seattle’s own Julian Love.

But Simmons, who basically replaced Love’s role (with much worse results), hit free agency and settled for a one-year, $2 million deal to stay in New York.

It’s not that Isaiah Simmons was doomed to fail because he was “positionless”, as great players will always find a way: Micah Parsons is going to be elite for a team whether he’s playing linebacker or edge; Cordarrelle Patterson found a way when he moved from receiver to running back.

But if there’s a lesson to take from Simmons being a bust, maybe it’s that there was too much projection going on for a top-10 prospect: “Hey this guy is such a great athlete, he flashed great range as a linebacker, I’m just sure that he will be as good in 1,000 snaps as he was in 200 snaps.”

I do not advise drafting players that high when you’re projecting them for new or expanded roles at positions they’re not proven at, which brings us back to Cooper DeJean.

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DeJean-ie in a bottle, baby

Iowa cornerback Cooper DeJean is sort of like the “Brock Bowers of defense” in the 2024 draft class in that he’s just so obviously the best football player on a really good team, and he always has been. As fans, it’s hard for us to not be entranced by the “one-percenters”, those players who are so much better than everyone else on the field even as they continue to move up levels and the competition gets more talented. This game-winning punt return vs. Michigan State is a perfect example of that and it’s not even his only game-winning punt return*.

Unless you are a Minnesota Gophers fan, you will probably agree that this is also a game-winning punt return.

And that’s just special teams. DeJean’s seven interceptions over the past two seasons, including three touchdowns, highlight his exceptional catching abilities and ball skills in the open field when he gets a chance to return it.

So Cooper DeJean has the production and as a bonus could be an elite NFL kicker returner under the new special teams rules. However, to be a first round pick you also have to be an exceptional athlete and DeJean qualifies there too: At his private workout (a late season injury cost him the combine and pro day), DeJean reportedly ran around a 4.43, had a 38.5” vertical, a 10’4 broad jump, and 16 reps on the bench.

If NFL teams agree these numbers are accurate and the medicals check out positively, then DeJean could be a top-20 pick and in the conversation as the first or second cornerback off of the board. His current average draft position in mocks is 20th, although he rarely does actually get drafted in the top-20 in those mocks. I think he just has a high mock draft floor in that nobody thinks he’ll get to day two, but few believe he’ll be picked before Seattle at 16.

That makes DeJean a viable candidate to be the Seahawks pick, solidified by his top-30 visit to Seattle this week.

A Seahawks-DeJean connection would only be bolstered by labels like “positionless” and “moveable chess piece” because of Mike Macdonald’s expected changes to Seattle’s defense after his two years of work on the Baltimore Ravens. Some have called DeJean the “Kyle Hamilton” (Baltimore’s All-Pro safety who was the 14th overall pick in the 2022 draft) of the 2024 draft class.

There were those who believed Hamilton should be a top-three pick given his stardom at Notre Dame as a defensive player who had eight interceptions in college. But others who doubted him as a first round pick because of positional value as a safety and a slow 4.59 in the 40-yard dash at 220 lbs. What Macdonald managed to do was put Hamilton in the best position to succeed and this is how SI’s Greg Bishop describes his role on the Ravens (which has every buzz word under the sun like “swiss army knife” and “chess piece”):

Sometimes, he is a safety; others, he’s not a safety at all. Consider him a queen on the world’s most violent chessboard. He covers large swaths deep downfield. He double-teams top targets. He blitzes quarterbacks and stuffs running backs and often slides to slot corner, where, at various points this season, he held the best coverage percentage in the league.

When he’s in the lineup, Baltimore ranks among the NFL’s fiercest defenses; when he sits, as he did twice for injuries this season, the same D, minus one player, ranks near the bottom of the league.

Maybe that’s because Hamilton is like more than one player for the Ravens. He’s a shutdown cornerback, an elite pass rusher who happens to not play defensive end, tackles like a middle linebacker and positions teammates like a quarterback.

In terms of actual positions, Hamilton plays as many as five—he has to count them over the phone—in any one game. He does this within the Ravens’ scheme, which can appear chaotic but is as organized, planned and detailed as chaos can be. 

In theory, it sounds very exciting to imagine the Seahawks drafting DeJean and Macdonald turning him into the Kyle Hamilton of Seattle’s defense, but it is not going to be as simple as “This guy good DB, this guy good DB, we make him do.”

For one, Hamilton was a safety in college and for most intents and purposes he’s a safety on the Ravens. Cooper DeJean has been an outside cornerback at Iowa—2022 (553 snaps at outside corner, 140 in slot, 91 in box) 2023 (almost every snap at outside cornerback)—and yet there is nothing close to a consensus opinion that he will play outside cornerback in the NFL. Ronde Barber, who was the person who led me to Devon Witherspoon last year, ranked DeJean fourth in the class. The key terms in the video below are that DeJean doesn’t change direction as fast as the other corners and struggles at the line of scrimmage, “He’s a turn and run cornerback, he’s not good at coming downhill.”

In what universe does that make DeJean anything like Hamilton? I saw another breakdown by a former player, this one being Arthur Moats who was a linebacker on the Steelers, and he agreed that DeJean is probably not an outside corner at the next level.

So, let’s logic this out a little bit: “This guy is versatile” implies that DeJean has the ability to start at outside cornerback, slot cornerback, and safety. Yet what I’m hearing from most analysts is that he can’t play outside unless it is in a pinch, so how is that included? It’s like they’re saying that DeJean can do three things because he can’t do one thing. That’s illogical.

Second, DeJean doesn’t excel at playing the line of scrimmage, so is he going to blitz like Hamilton does for the Ravens? Is he going to cover middle-of-the-field receivers like Hamilton? Is he going to tackle like Hamilton? Is he going to be able to play safety even though he’s never played safety? The comparison to Kyle Hamilton makes no sense and the only reason why I’m even feeling the need to point this out is that the Seahawks DID fly DeJean to Seattle for a visit so obviously they want to know more about him for some purpose.

Cooper DeJean’s fit with the Seahawks

If the Seahawks did select DeJean, I’d have to assume that this means Seattle wants Devon Witherspoon to be a full-time player on the outside, with sprinkles of him playing near the line of scrimmage because he was so good at disguising his blitz and closing speed to the quarterback. He’s also a superb tackler. Therefore, DeJean would likely need to get comfortable in the slot, although coaches could disagree with draft analysts about his ability to play outside and give him the opportunity to beat Riq Woolen, Tre Brown, and Mike Jackson for a job there.

On special teams, I have no doubt that DeJean would be an NFL kick and punt returner, although that isn’t something that should impact a team’s decision to draft a player in the first round. That should almost be a bonus you don’t consider until after you’ve chosen him for every other reason you need.

I think Cooper DeJean is a great football player and special in the history of an Iowa program that has put a LOT of prospects into the NFL, but I think it is a red flag to say that a player’s next position is one that he’s not very familiar with and DeJean has only ever been two things: An outside corner (which may not work for him in the NFL) and a returner (which isn’t a first round pick).

To some, “positionless” means the same thing as versatile.

But in some cases, “positionless” means you just don’t have a position at all. And having a position is kind of important in football.

It’s not that DeJean can’t succeed—I think he probably will—but I am skeptical of a team taking that “positionless” player in the middle of the first round.