Tariq Woolen rookie scouting report

Woolen's 6 interceptions were legit, but he has holes in his game that need fixing: Seaside Joe 1590

Seahawks report to training camp in: 16 days

The NFL will probably always have a “good cornerback” deficiency, or as they say, “If he could catch, he’d be a receiver.”

A good example being Jalen Ramsey, a player who would probably be as bad at being a receiver as he is as good at being a cornerback; Ramsey turns into the melting man from Robocop whenever he’s got a free play on the ball.

It’s almost as if all of football’s great cornerbacks were the product of a glitch in the matrix, for the lack of a better explanation. Richard Sherman failed as a receiver at Stanford. Devon Witherspoon got zero recruiting love coming out of high school and also got a late start, not committing himself to football until he was about 16. Sauce Gardner was in a similar position, turning down the likes of Ball State and Akron for Cincinnati.

And many of the NFL’s top cornerbacks were surprises to the league, getting drafted on day two like Darius Slay, Trevon Diggs, and Xavien Howard, or going much later, if not going undrafted like J.C. Jackson or Chris Harris.

Perhaps that’s one reason why “legacy cornerbacks” like Patrick Surtain II, Asante Samuel Jr., and Antoine Winfield Jr. (not a cornerback, a safety, but similar circumstances) have found such early success in the NFL: Their reasons for dedicating themselves to defensive positions instead of as offensive weapons can simply be attributed to having fathers who were Pro Bowl cornerbacks.

In order for something to go right for you as a cornerback in the NFL, it’s as if something has to go wrong for you along the way.

Tariq Woolen is no exception.

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Tariq Woolen didn’t want to be a cornerback

Shortly before the 2022 NFL Draft, I listened to an interview with Woolen on a podcast (I’m forgetting which one, sorry) and he made it clear that switching to defense was the last thing he wanted to do at UTSA. After redshirting in 2017, Woolen played in 12 games as a receiver in 2018 and made 15 catches for 158 yards.

The next year, Woolen’s career trajectory as a receiver was going in the wrong direction, finishing with nine catches for 105 yards, and it was around then that his football dreams could have died entirely. But Woolen didn’t just want to not give up football—despite also not being super productive in high school (31 catches for 536 yards as a senior), he also didn’t want to give up being a receiver. He hadn’t cracked 1,000 yards TOTAL over his past four years of being a receiver, including high school, but as he told PFF before the 2022 draft, Woolen was vehemently against switching to defense when UTSA coaches asked him to give it a shot at the end of the 2019 season.

“I was like, ‘nah, nah, nah, nah.’ I was denying it, denying it. You should’ve seen me,” Woolen told PFF last week.

He considered transferring from UTSA, but eventually, he acquiesced — kind of.

“Basically he was like, ‘How about this? If it helps the team, why wouldn't you try?’” Woolen recalled. “So I was like, ‘I’ll try it.’”

There were three weeks left in the season, and in the two weeks he spent learning an entire side of the ball he’d never played before, Woolen would try to sneak away from his fellow cornerbacks to try to run wide receiver drills. Coaches would pull him back over to the cornerback group, and he played 20 snaps in the final game of UTSA’s 2019 season at his new position.

“I feel like I held my own a little bit,” Woolen said. “They said Cover 1: follow the guy wherever he goes. Cover 3: just bail.”

Had it not been for the pandemic in 2020, Woolen may have switched back to receiver. But the extra time off gave him more time to workout at cornerback and it seemed like he might actually have an NFL future, plus it would help UTSA, so that became his sole focus as of 2020.

Woolen made seven starts at cornerback in 2020, which is more than his combined total through his first three years at UTSA as a wide receiver, and he was finally an integral part of a football team again. In 2021, Woolen was named as an honorable mention All-Conference in Conference USA at cornerback and he was invited to the Senior Bowl…something that seemed like an impossible dream just two years earlier as a receiver with barely 200 career yards.

As you already know, Woolen then became “the DK Metcalf of defense” after running a 4.26 in the 40-yard dash and a 42” vertical at the combine, putting himself in the running as a 6’4, 205 lbs cornerback who would at least get drafted. We’ve seen countless athletic freaks get deemed as “projects” by the NFL who were instead various levels of draft busts—whether that be the top-10 pick variety or a wasted day three pick—but Tariq Woolen didn’t even turn out to be as much of a project as anticipated so does he count?

With six interceptions in 2022, Woolen tied for the NFL lead and surely gives the Seattle Seahawks no worse than an above average starting cornerback for the next three years at a significant discount. It also makes Woolen another example of how great cornerbacks often fall in that direction entirely by accident; he didn’t want to be a cornerback, but the game of football clearly didn’t want him to be a receiver.

It’s not for lack of athleticism or size. It’s not for lack of effort or intelligence. It’s not for lack of hands or even ball tracking, as evidenced by his six interceptions. But something doesn’t click for ‘Riq when he’s on offense and he’s potentially going to become a $20 million per season player on defense if he continues to improve.

Still, had Woolen been the same value on offense as a rookie as he was on defense, say receiving for 1,000 yards as a fifth round steal, then he’d already be as famous as Tyreek Hill or Stefon Diggs. Instead, many of my non-Seahawks fan friends still don’t know who he is or what he did; that should only get more complicated when he shows up as “Riq Woolen” next season instead of “Tariq Woolen” following an apparent name change this summer.

With that being said, Woolen is far more advanced than anyone anticipated going into the 2022 NFL Draft, but also maybe not nearly as polished as his All-Pro votes might indicate.

The YouTuber Thinking Football is someone who I’ve been following all summer during my non-negotiable daily habit to watch at least 10 minutes of Xs and Os and we were lucky to get a Riq Woolen breakdown on Sunday. I encourage you to watch the whole video, it’s only 11 minutes of your time, but I’ll cover a few positives and weaknesses noted in the clip below:

Positives:

• Great at baiting QBs into mistakes

• Speed and long frame (obviously)

• Foot speed

• Awareness/Focus

• Fantastic range (can make up for some mistakes with closing speed)

• Ball skills

• Most comfortable off man

• IQ despite lack of experience

“But for all the great snaps he put up, there are still some serious holes in Woolen’s game and he’s got a long way to come before he’s complete,” notes Thinking Football. And I know it’s hard to not feel defensive of a player like Woolen who has come so far in such a short period of time and instantly become one of Seattle’s best players. But I don’t think that Thinking Football is trying to be unfair or critical of Woolen and instead is just doing what any good coach would do: Give football players notes on areas of improvement.

It is also what good opposing coaches would do: Pick apart a player’s weaknesses and avoid his strengths, as we saw in the Seahawks wild card loss to the San Francisco 49ers.

Things to work on:

• Press play and alignment needs serious overhaul

• Falls for inside releases

• Must understand nuances of receivers setting him up to fail off the line

• Gets caught overcommitting with hips

• Bad technique with his jam/jab

• Got confused by play action

• Doesn’t know how to use size to his advantage, appears “weak”

• Fails to generate power

• Hesitates too often

• Teams ran directly at him more and more often as the season went on

• Can’t shed blocks

• “Seeks out blocks to avoid making the tackle” and lacks physicality

It is the final criticism of Woolen’s rookie season that will hurt him the most and it is the polar opposite of the scouting report on new teammate Devon Witherspoon, who was oft cited as the most physical and violent prospect in the 2023 NFL Draft class. Maybe that is yet another reason that Seattle made Witherspoon the fifth overall pick, to complement, inspire, and challenge Woolen’s lack of physicality, violence, and run defense with a brand of football intensity that the Seahawks defense is sorely lacking.

But where Witherspoon is lacking, size, that’s where Woolen’s 4.26 on a 6’4 frame will give Seattle the most unique (and arguably soon the best) cornerback duo in the NFL. Perhaps even a trio if Mike Jackson, cited by Pete Carroll as the player who had the best minicamp of anyone on the roster at any position, is close to as valuable as the Seahawks coaching staff thinks he could be.

Few cornerbacks seem to have chosen the position on their own. It’s either something you were born to do or something you were bred to do after a failed career as a receiver. Woolen may be both: He was born to be an elite NFL cornerback, he just took a long time to accept it. If he has ignored the accolades of his standout rookie campaign and accepted that he still has a list of flaws to improve, he might actually become the best cornerback in the game.

Whether he wanted to be that originally or not.

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