| 27 February 2010
Every year in the NFL draft there's a player or players that emerge that are overlooked because they played at the lower level of college football. Because those players are from small schools, they must obviously have inferior ability or talent. Yet year after year there's some players that come through and have an immediate impact in the NFL even though they don't get the level of respect they deserve. You would think after players like Walter Payton and Jerry Rice had such enormous success in the NFL that small school players would get more respect. Okay that's a stretch not every small school player is going to be on the level of two of the greatest players of all time, but there are plenty of solid prospects out there, Joe Flacco, Johnny Knox to name two that Bears fans are most familiar with right now.
So we come to a small school player who just might fit into that category of overlooked and little known prospect who might be able to play at the NFL level. Murray State DE Austen Lane a 6-foot-6 267-pound player who racked up some pretty impressive numbers at this small Kentucky school. What type of stats did Lane rack up? Try 64 tackles, 19.5 tackles for a loss and 11 sacks, impressive numbers by any standard of measurement. The 19.5 TFLs would put him amongst the leaders in the country at the very least in the top-10 players in the country at the FBS level.
Fittingly though Lane was invited to the Senior Bowl and performed well there showing a very explosive first step and a variety of counter moves that gave the OTs there fits. Needless to say this small school player is on the rise and with good reason.
However it will be of interest to see what he measures in at the combine, is he a legit 6-foot-6? Because that type of length could lead to a number of batted balls if he's not getting to the QB. Lane may very well be the exact type of player that catches the eye of Rod Marinelli and could be a sleeper who just might come in and grow into the role of a third down pass rusher.
Plus I'd like to see more of his burst of the edge and compare it to some of the other "elite" pass rushers that are in the 2010 NFL draft. The talk is that this year's draft is deep at the D-Line position and if a player like Lane is able to compete with the best and show the types of flashes out of a player against the same level of prospects he may just wind up being a still in the third or fourth round.
Of note as I was searching around for information on Lane was this scouting report done by a legitimate writer and scout from the website NFLDraftScout.com. Lane will obviously be one to keep an eye on given all the praise heaped upon him by this writer.
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