There was a lot outside of Boye Mafe's control, but he dominated his reps when he was given the chance
There's more to a prospect than what meets the eye
Boye Mafe was a two or three-star weakside defensive end prospect out of Minnetonka, Minnesota in 2017. He was unranked nationally and he chose to play for the Minnesota Gophers over Rutgers, Wyoming, and three directional schools: North Dakota, South Dakota State, and Northern Iowa.
In few cases would Minnesota be expected as a program that produces NFL defensive ends—the most recent Gopher DE to be drafted before Mafe was Stylez G. White, a seventh round pick in 2002. White was taken by the Texans but didn’t make the team, and after a dominant career in the Arena league, debuted with the Buccaneers in 2007. The defensive coordinator that year?
Monte Kiffin, the first person to ever hire Pete Carroll for a football job.
Mafe mulled his commitment decision but was ultimately sold on Minnesota because of the demeanor of defensive line coach Bryce Paup, the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year in 1995 when he posted 17.5 sacks with the Bills.
“In the interviews, you could tell coach Fleck was very energetic,” Mafe said. “But I got to meet coach Paup and that’s really what sold me. I liked his calming manner and his coaching style. You can learn from him.”
Paul enjoyed his greatest success playing for Wade Phillips in Buffalo, but also had ties to the Vikings and was briefly a coach at Minnesota; Carroll spent his first NFL season with the Bills alongside Kiffen, then the next five as an assistant under Bud Grant with the Vikings.
However, Paup left the Gophers after one season (reportedly to pursue a job in the NFL, but Paup ended up going back to his previous position with the University of Northern Iowa) and was replaced by Marcus West for one season. West, who was recently hired for his first NFL job, fittingly as an assistant DL coach with the Bills, considered himself to be a product of the John Teerlinck DE coaching tree…
Teerlinck, who coached up players like John Randle, Robert Mathis, and Dwight Freeney, was also tied to Minnesota: He was an assistant for the Vikings from 1992-1994, alongside Kiffen.
In 2019, Boye Mafe got his third defensive line coach in three years, and I can’t imagine how that must feel when the number one reason you chose your college program was because of how the original defensive line coach made you feel. That year, West left for Charlotte and was replaced by Jim Panagos, a former defensive tackle for Kansas who got his first NFL job in 2002 with…yep…
The Minnesota Vikings.
Panagos has held seven different jobs for five different schools over the last eight years. He left Minnesota to return to Rutgers after one season at the helm. Despite continuity with P.J. Fleck as the head coach all this time, defensive linemen like Mafe were getting new ideas, new techniques, and new philosophies on an annual basis. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I can’t say, but it is a thing.
In 2020, Fleck hired Chad Wilt as the defensive line coach, a person who actually has no ties to the NFL, the Vikings, or the state of Minnesota. In 2014-15, Wilt was the defensive line coach at Maryland, where Yannick Ngakoue was thriving and Quinton Jefferson wasn’t far behind; and in 2019, Wilt was with the University of Cincinnati coaching players like Myjai Sanders, himself a third round pick in the 2022 NFL Draft.
Mafe actually got two years with Wilt, now the defensive coordinator at Indiana.
I’ve spent a lot of time detailing the erratic assistant coaching carousel at Minnesota that was out of Mafe’s control, so what can we learn about the parts of football that were in Mafe’s control? During his two years of playing under Wilt, there were few edge rushers in college football who had a greater impact than Boye Mafe.
Early in the 2020 season, shortened to six games in the Big Ten because of the pandemic, Mafe was a game wrecker in contests against Michigan, Maryland, and Illinois to open the year, posting 3.5 sacks and a forced fumble on an otherwise bad team:
If you’re looking for a bright spot on one of the nation’s worst defenses to date, Mafe is it. And to think the redshirt junior didn’t even crack the starting rotation at the beginning of the season.
“Boye has come a long way, and I think he hasn’t even started to scratch the surface to where he can go,” Golden Gophers coach P.J. Fleck said this week. “Boye is going to be a really good player here, and you’ve got to choose to be a really good player here.”
That’s how it has to work in Dinkytown. In addressing the squad’s defensive struggles, Fleck has described Minnesota as a “developmental program.”
Despite his lack of recruiting stars, Mafe was known to be a unique athlete at 6’4, 265 lbs, and through his first three years in Minnesota the focus was always more on refining those gifts with strength and conditioning coach Dan Nichol, then harnessing them into becoming a force on the field under Wilt.
Mafe became a top-five player on Bruce Feldman’s “College Football Freaks” list for The Athletic in 2020:
Inside the Gophers’ program, they’re expecting a big year from Mafe, who had flashed some of his potential in 2019 (3.5 tackles for loss and three sacks). Very few guys his size can jump the way the 6-4, 260-pounder can. His vertical is 40½ inches. That’s 4½ inches higher than any defensive lineman at the NFL combine this year. He can touch the top of the square on a basketball backboard.
But it’s not just his vertical. All of his numbers that are head-turning. Mafe has broad jumped 10-6. He has run a 4.57 40. His 10-yard split is 1.58. His short shuttle is 4.3. He can power clean 400 pounds and squats 653. It’s just a whole lot of wow stuff.
Tapping into that potential, Mafe posted 4.5 sacks and two forced fumbles in only six games as a junior. Before his final season with Minnesota—Mafe was indeed draft eligible in 2020 and 2021, but had yet to convert athleticism into the production necessary to guarantee himself an early draft slot—Gophers podcast host Nate Dickerson was praising Mafe for his first step explosion, bend, and closing burst on the QB:
“It seems like Mafe never stops moving when he’s rushing the passer off the edge,” Dickerson said. “The good offensive linemen can push him to one side for a few steps, but it’s very rare to see a single blocker keep him contained in any way. He finds a way to always be taking some sort of angle to the ball and doesn’t care if your tackle comes along for the ride. I imagine Mafe is one of those players linemen hate blocking just because he refuses to give up on the play, and it makes him someone who becomes a thorn in an offense’s side through the course of a game.”
Mafe’s biggest question marks, then and now, surround his ability to defend the run. Early in his NFL career, to say the least, Mafe could be a situational pass rusher and little more. Which is definitely something that the Seattle Seahawks have been lacking in recent seasons and didn’t fully address with the Uchenna Nwosu signing. But improving against the run game is something that Mafe has acknowledged is important since before last season:
“For me, first and second down is the first part of the game. I know I need to improve on those things and that's a conversation we had an offseason and kind of looked at the film and it was highlighted where my weaknesses were. And they noticed I didn't play as strong.
So we basically devised a plan on how to attack those things and how we're going to go about it. And that plan really was to go into the spring and work on those little things that would improve my game. That's starts with improving my play on first and second down and I'm now playing it with better technique as I'm more sound."
In 2021, his second with Wilt, Mafe helped Minnesota give Ohio State a run for their money in Week 1, then posted six sacks over the next six games, including two each against Colorado and Bowling Green State.
He finished the year with a sack and four tackles in Minnesota’s bowl game win over West Virginia and in total has 15.5 tackles for a loss over his last 18 games, as well as 14.5 sacks over his final 25 college contests.
And he’s not even refined yet.
At the 2022 NFL Scouting Combine, Mafe weighed in at 261 lbs, then ran a 4.53 in the 40, a 1.56 10-yard split, a 38” vertical, and a 10’5 broad jump. Compared to first overall pick Travon Walker, Mafe has shorter arms (but not short arms, Walker’s got freakishly long OT arms), is two inches shorter, and weighs 10 lbs less, and is two years older, but he’s one of the few humans in this class who measure up in speed and explosiveness to the number one overall pick.
Dane Brugler summed up Mafe’s draft resume as this:
Overall, Mafe isn’t yet the sum of his parts and requires further schooling as a run defender, but he can get after the passer with natural explosion in his lower body, hips and hands. He projects as a subpackage NFL rusher with starting potential as he continues to be coached up.
NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein compared Mafe to Rashan Gary and said he could be a good candidate to develop quickly at the next level:
Mafe's evaluation requires the evaluator to focus more closely on the flashes than just the play-to-play action. His combination of rare explosive measurables with average fundamentals could make for a perfect storm of rapid development once he gets focused skill work at the pro level. His footwork is average and he lacks desired instincts as a rusher, but pairing efficient hand work with twitchy upper-body power could turn him into a productive rush bully. He has the traits and toughness to develop into an above-average starter as a 4-3 base end.
Had Russell Wilson been two inches taller, he would’ve been a first round pick. And had Mafe entered the NFL two years younger, he could have gone in the top-10, ahead of pre-draft favorite Jermaine Johnson. Maybe going on day two instead of day one will turn into a strength—another strength—of Mafe’s:
“You have to be a humble player that's capable of adapting to your surroundings," he said. "You might come up with a game plan of how to attack an offensive tackle, and maybe it's not working like you thought it might. Then you have to be able to adjust by coming up with a different plan of attack."
The Seahawks chose Mafe with the 40th overall pick in the draft, essentially finalizing their need to address the pass rush with a premier developmental prospect, albeit one who comes in a couple years older than the norm, then doubling down with Tyreke Smith in round five. In Seattle, Mafe will team up with defensive coordinator Clint Hurtt, as well as a defensive ends coach who knows a thing or two about hype and expectations… Aaron Curry.
In fact, few athletes in combine history would match up as well with Mafe (Curry weighed 254, ran a 4.56, with a 1.5 split at the 2009 combine) and not many former Seahawks draft picks would be able to do a better job in contrasting the difference between expectations and results.
At least with Pete Carroll, it feels like Boye Mafe is exactly where he was meant to be. And maybe with Seattle’s potential to get back to playing scary defense again, he’ll actually have some necessary continuity with regards to who’s teaching him how to play football.
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