Tyler Booker 2025 NFL Draft Scouting Report: Is Alabama OL Worth First Round Hype?
Alabama offensive lineman Tyler Booker enjoyed a brief wave of top ten hype, but a poor NFL Combine has brought his stock back down to earth.
Tyler Booker is the perfect NFL guard.
In like, 1997.
The 321 pound Alabama product has had one of the widest ranges on big boards this year, with some analysts placing him as high as the top ten and others landing as low as a Day 2 grade. The highs with Booker are high - pancake blocks in short areas and flashy knockouts of smaller players on screens. But the lows are pretty low, too - quick losses and poor explosion, backed up by his sub-5 RAS testing at the NFL Combine.
Booker entered Alabama as a consensus four-star recruit with NFL bloodlines via his uncle, Ulish, an offensive tackle for the Falcons and Steelers. After one season at Bergen Catholic in New Jersey, Booker made a common trip for elite high school prospects, moving to IMG Academy in Florida. There, he played right tackle as a junior because IMG had future top ten pick JC Latham - Booker’s future teammate at Alabama - on the left side. Between that experience and his snaps in college, Booker has played every offensive line position except center.
Left guard is where he found a home, however, winning the job as a sophomore in 2023 before becoming a team captain and All-American in 2024. To accomplish that much at a school like Alabama requires a certain level of talent, and that raw ability is evident quickly when you click on Booker’s tape.
A powerful run blocker who is frequently the one to open running lanes between the tackles, Booker also carries the finishing mentality teams always look for in offensive linemen. He gets decent drive as a run blocker most of the time despite his testing numbers suggesting he should be a poor player off the snap, mostly because of his tackle-like arm length (34 1/2”).
As a pass blocker, Booker’s best trait is his ability to stay square and avoid giving a clear target for defenders to strike. Playing that counterpunching style can be risky, and when Booker loses, he loses quickly. But when the junior latches on, those defenders have nowhere to go. Without a clear assignment, Booker is always looking for work, but his understanding of pocket integrity also keeps him from overextending.
Booker’s limitations really have little to do with his technique and style and all to do with his athleticism, or lack thereof. He’s not effective on screens or pulls consistently because he’s such a lumbering runner, which gives smaller defenders ample opportunity to navigate around him. As a climber, he’s subject to losing track of his target for much the same reason. When defenders do get by him, there’s not much recourse for him to recover and latch back on unless he has support of some kind.
All of that points very strongly in the direction of a classical gap guard. If you keep Booker in a phone booth and get him moving downhill in the run game, he can make a real impact as a rookie starter. Asking him to long pull or get to the outside frequently is a recipe for disaster, however, and that scheme specificity brings to mind current Bills guard O’Cyrus Torrence.
Torrence was consistently mocked as an early second-round or back of the first round type player - I personally had him mocked to Buffalo at the end of the first round in 2023. But his similar schematic limitations ended up dropping him to Buffalo’s second round pick all the way down at the 59th overall pick.
With a group of gap-heavy teams in the middle and back half of the second round - Arizona (47th), the Chargers (55th), and Baltimore (59th) - I think Booker could be in for a similar slide. He’s simply too limited of an athlete for me to get on board with a first round grade. I landed on a low second round valuation that happens to also match the range where all his best pro fits sit.
Final Grade: 7.73 (Second Round)
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