Coverage Skills
Things often went wrong for Sheffield fairly early into snaps, as his press needs a huge amount of work. He gets extremely flat-footed and gets too upright, as evidenced by the ease with which he got knocked over on the following play:
This also makes it hard for him to stay in front of receivers, such as on the following play where the receiver gets alongside him before he gets his feet around and as a result, he spends the rest of the play trying to catch up:
It’s hard to know whether this is something that can be fixed – there is a chance that he simply can’t move his feet fast enough to play press effectively. This is something that teams would be wise to test during workouts; but even if it can be, it is something that a team will have to spend time doing, limiting his ability to get on the field early on. Otherwise, there could be an awful lot of plays like this:
Another concern with Sheffield is how he played in off coverage, as when asked to drop into a vertical backpedal, he looked extremely uncomfortable:
And while he is able to get away with this at times due to his quickness, this is another thing that any prospective team will need to do significant work on before he is able to play in this way at the NFL level:
So he needs work in off coverage and in press, but one coverage where he actually showed some nice things was cover 3. Unlike his straight backpedal, he actually looked reasonably comfortable when driving to the deep third:
Which, in turn, made it possible for him to maximize the impact of his quickness in contesting at the catch point and limiting yards after the catch:
However, while this is certainly a reason to be positive, any team that thinks that they can stick Sheffield into a cover 3 scheme and get a high level of play from day one should also bear in mind that he was subject to the occasional blown coverage as well:
In terms of ball skills, Sheffield did come down with a couple of picks in 2018, and showed some ability to compete at the catch point:
And his ability to track the ball in the air isn’t amazing:
Sheffield isn’t ready to come in and play right away, and any team that drafts him expecting him to be that is likely going to get an unpleasant surprise, but it is hard to ignore his potential when it comes to the final day of the draft.
Up Next: Run Defense
