In 37 years coaching in the SEC, Rodney Garner has worked with some of football’s best defensive linemen.
He’s coached eight first-round draft picks, 10 All-Americans and helped develop players like Hall of Famer Richard Seymour and Pro Bowlers Geno Atkins, Derrick Brown, Marcus Stroud, Dee Ford and Byron Young.
This year, Garner had two linemen drafted out of the University of Tennessee, and he said one of them – Detroit Lions seventh-round pick Tyre West – is “as gifted as anybody” he’s ever coached.
“He has the explosiveness of a Johnathan Sullivan,” Garner said of the sixth pick of the 2003 NFL draft. “Everybody thinks Seymour was my most talented and Seymour was … probably the best player consistently that I ever coached, but Johnathan Sullivan probably was the most gifted. It’s just this kid has explosiveness, he has power, he has play strength at the line of scrimmage. He has instincts. He makes plays, that’s what he does. He makes a lot of plays.”
West had 10 sacks and 20½ tackles for loss in four seasons as a rotational player at Tennessee after originally committing to Georgia out of high school.
The Bulldogs pulled their scholarship offer late, and Garner, who recruited West at Auburn before leaving for Tennessee, signed West as one of the last players in Tennessee’s 2022 recruiting class.
“He comes from very humble means, so he is a great young man,” Garner said. “He’s a hard worker. I mean, this is truly his way-out situation. He’s the first in his family to ever graduate from college. I mean, the hurdles and things that he’s overcome, it’s been really miraculous with all that he’s gone through.”
West averaged just 17.4 snaps per game for the Volunteers, according to 247sports.com – something Garner attributes to his long-held belief in rotating linemen – and is considered undersized by NFL standards at 6 feet 1 and 278 pounds.
But Garner said West’s upside and work ethic give him a chance to far outperform his draft status.
“If you sit there and just be totally honest, he was a tweener,” Garner said. “He wasn’t quite long enough to be on the edge all the time and wasn’t quite big enough to be inside all the time, but he was such a good football player and those scouts come in, all of them always want to talk about Tyre because the traits that he put on tape were really good traits. And then to see this kid be able to graduate when nobody thought he would, that showed that he could set a goal and he could achieve it and accomplish it and all that.”
West played as a base-down defensive end at Tennessee and moved inside to tackle in some pass-rush situations.
Garner said West rushed primarily out of a 4i-technique, on the inside shoulder of the offensive tackle, in Tennessee’s odd-man front, and played everywhere from a 5-technique on the open-side of the field to a 9-technique split wide in the Vols’ four-man look.
“He’s truly a mismatch inside when you put him on a guard or a center,” Garner said. “That’s a true mismatch. Like I said, [Lions defensive line coach] Kacy [Rodgers] just loved his power and his initial quickness, all those things. I mean, he has the traits. He’s just got to get in there and dive into the playbook and know it inside and out.”
Lions general manager Brad Holmes said after the draft West likely would compete for a job as a sub-package pass rusher as a rookie.
The Lions return Aidan Hutchinson, Alim McNeill and Tyleik Williams as feature players on their defensive line, but overhauled the rest of the unit this offseason. They signed DJ Wonnum and Jay Tufele in free agency, expect Levi Onwuzurike to return from a torn ACL and added three linemen in the draft – West, second-round defensive end Derrick Moore and sixth-round tackle Skyler Gill-Howard, another undersized pass rusher.
Garner said West still has room to grow fundamentally with his technique and must prove he can learn multiple spots on the Lions’ defensive line. But he said West can “easily” develop into a base-down edge run defender in the NFL whose greatest value comes as an interior pass rusher.
“That’s what I told Kacy, that’s how I see him because he can set the edge, he can hold the edge and he is physical,” Garner said. “The thing everybody’s going to talk about is measurables, the arm length, the length to be out there. That would be his only issue if you were just doing it strictly off measurables. But just the physicality portion of it, he’s going to be one of your more physical kids on the team and he’s tough as [bleeping] nails now. I mean, he can play with pain, he’ll fight through pain. I mean this is a kid that he probably dealt with other pain just growing up.”
Dave Birkett covers the Lions for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Bluesky, X and Instagram at @davebirkett.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Lions rookie Tyre West ‘a true mismatch,’ could outperform draft status
Reporting by Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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