The Indianapolis Colts signed safety Tyreque Jones to the practice squad and released defensive tackle Ross Blacklock from the practice squad, the team announced Monday.
An undrafted rookie free agent out of Boise State, Jones spent time with the Tennessee Titans this offseason and spent the first seven weeks of the season on the New York Jets practice squad.
In 59 games (38 starts) at Boise State, Jones recorded 157 tackles (110) solo, 18 passes defensed, four interceptions, 12.0 tackles for loss and 1.0 sack.
Blacklock spent one week on the Colts’ practice squad before being released Monday.
Shaun Calderon names one rookie to watch at each position on defense for the Titans going into training camp, a list that includes all undrafted free agents.
After going over the Titans’ offensive rookies on Monday, today we take a closer look at which defensive rookies to keep an eye on as training camp rapidly approaches.
The Titans’ defense looks very strong on paper, in particular when it comes to the top of the depth chart. Tennessee has a good mix of established playmakers and young talent all across the board.
However, to say the depth at several positions is questionable at best would be drastically underselling it.
As we noted in the offensive article earlier this week, the Titans used all of their draft picks on offense, which means this article is going to revolve around undrafted free agents who are looking to make a name for themselves.
Believe it or not, there are some very intriguing players on this list despite their status as undrafted free agents, so let’s not wait any longer and dive right into it.
What scouting reports said about Titans UDFA safety Tyreque Jones.
Boise State product and safety Tyreque Jones was one of several undrafted free agents the Tennessee Titans signed following the 2023 NFL draft and hosted at rookie minicamp a few weeks back.
Jones appeared in 48 games over six years with the Broncos, totaling 157 tackles (12 for loss), four interceptions, 14 passes defensed and one sack.
Jones enters a pretty good situation in Tennessee in terms of his chances to make the roster or practice squad, as the Titans are very thin at safety behind the projected starters, Kevin Byard and Amani Hooker.
In order to get more information on Jones, we perused some scouting reports on him and compiled them together in one place. Let’s see what experts had to say about the Boise State product.
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.
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.
