New York Jets draft UF’s Jabari Zuniga. Can he turn ‘flashes’ into ‘stardom’?
Jabari Zuniga was hoping to follow up his breakout junior year with a strong senior season, one that would continue to lift his already rising draft stock and give him an easier path to his NFL dream.
A high ankle sprain derailed those thoughts and limited him to just six games, with Zuniga playing through pain in the majority of those contests.
But there were enough flashes during his final season with the Florida Gators, and from his college career as a whole, for the New York Jets to take a chance on the edge rusher.
The Jets drafted Zuniga in the third round — No. 79 overall — of the 2020 NFL Draft on Friday.
Zuniga, 6-3 and 264 pounds,recorded 118 tackles, 34.5 tackles for loss and 18.5 sacks in 42 career games with the Gators. He had seven tackles for loss in his six-game redshirt senior season, three of which came against the Miami Hurricanes in UF’s season opener.
Lucky for Zuniga, he already had a full season of highlights to show off from a year earlier. Zuniga tallied 11 tackles for loss as a redshirt junior in 2018, serving as a one-two punch with fellow defensive lineman Jachai Polite.
A strong showing at the NFL Combine helped keep Zuniga’s draft stock in good position.
“With Zuniga, you either buy into the flashes or you don’t,” NFL analyst Lance Zierlein wrote in his combine breakdown. “He’s an explosive athlete who has been splashing and flashing since his freshman season but failed to fully reach the promise his traits and explosiveness implied. A monstrous start to 2019 was truncated due to a high ankle sprain. He’s disruptive in the gaps but is not stout enough at the point of attack. He has edge-rushing ability but could find stardom as a reduced rusher in sub-packages, where he’s craftier and more capable of exploiting athletic mismatches. His boogeyman qualities could spring themselves upon unsuspecting offenses relatively early in his career, but his grade is based on projection over production.”
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