1st Round, Eighth Overall: Ravens Jaguars Select Derrick Harvey

Christmas ApeChristmas Ape|published: Sat 26th April, 15:58 2008

We used to call guys like Harvey "tweeners." Now they're called "hybrids." Scouting gibberish has gone green


! Tweeners ... oops, hybrids, are undersized defensive ends who can play a little linebacker, or really big linebackers who can play defensive end. They're not that rare, and through most of football history they weren't that useful. Then, defensive coordinators started concocting wacky 3-2-6 zone-blitz schemes where safeties rushed the quarterback, linemen dropped into zones, and 320-pound nose tackles slurped Gatorade on the sidelines and contemplated the extinction of their species. Suddenly, the Harveys of the world are in high demand. Harvey was a straight defensive end at Florida, but he wants the world to know he has a fuel cell under his hood. "I dropped [into coverage] every game," he said recently. "We had five zones at Florida, so everyone had to drop a lot." All that talk of coverage is nice, but every hybrid is an eight-cylinder hemi at heart, and Harvey is at his best when crunching quarterbacks. His pass rushing technique could use a little work (he's entering the draft as a junior), but he has the change-of-direction quickness to run around offensive tackles, and he has enough power to hold his own at the point of attack. The Jaguars don't really need a hybrid, anyway. They want someone who can play end in a base 4-3 and provide some depth: Paul Spicer led the Jags with 7.5 sacks, but no other defender had more than 4.

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