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2023 NFL Draft Profile: Boise State DB Tyreque Jones
The versatile Broncos defensive back isn’t the biggest name from Boise State in this year’s NFL Draft, but he shouldn’t be overlooked.
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Underrated, but not to be forgotten.
The Boise State Broncos have a few strong candidates to be picked in this year’s NFL Draft, but the one player most fans are likely to be least familiar with is Tyreque Jones.
A native of San Bernardino, California, Jones was plenty busy for the next five years after making five starts as a redshirt freshman in 2018. He helped Boise State win a conference championship in 2019 and twice earned all-conference honorable mentions, in 2021 and 2022, while playing all over the secondary for Bryan Harsin and Andy Avalos.
If you don’t know him, now’s a good time to get started.
Measurables (taken from Mockdraftable and Dane Brugler)
Three-cone drill: 7.05 seconds
Bench press: 9 reps
Highlights
Strengths
If you’re looking for a versatile defensive back with an outrageous catch radius, you’d be hard pressed to find a better fit than Jones: Across five seasons at Boise State, he played more than 500 snaps each at free safety, in the box, and as a nickelback and racked up 14 career passes defended. He’s also not afraid to mix it up when tasked with defending the run, either, posting at least three tackles for loss in three different seasons.
That physicality and straight-line speed could make Jones an asset in press coverage, as NFL Draft Buzz points out, while The Draft Network’s Damian Parson expresses confidence that he could among the next line of hybrid defenders capable of playing from multiple places on the field.
Weaknesses
Will missed tackles be a problem at the next level? The Athletic’s Dane Brugler expressed a concern that Jones prefers “striking over wrap-tackling” while NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein simply calls his tackling “erratic”. With that in mind, it’s worth noting that Pro Football Focus marked him as having a 22.3% missed tackle rate across just over 2,500 career snaps (for the sake of comparison, teammate JL Skinner had a 12.5% rate in his time with the Broncos).
NFL Comparison
Eddie Jackson
Draft Prediction
It may be a coin flip whether or not Jones gets drafted, but that says less about him and more about the numbers game he and other defensive back prospects will face over three days. For my part, I would bet that a team will look at the upside of Jones’s ability to do a little bit of everything in the defensive backfield and feel confident that they could coach him toward greater successes, so I think he’ll be picked sometime during Day Three, probably in the sixth round.
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