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NFL Draft Film Breakdown: What Shemar Stewart Brings to Cincinnati Bengals' Defense

The Cincinnati Bengals picked Stewart with the No. 17 overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft.
Mike Santagata|
Sep 2, 2023; College Station, Texas, USA; Texas A&M Aggies defensive lineman Shemar Stewart (4) in action during the first half against the New Mexico Lobos at Kyle Field. Mandatory Credit: Maria Lysaker-Imagn Images
Sep 2, 2023; College Station, Texas, USA; Texas A&M Aggies defensive lineman Shemar Stewart (4) in action during the first half against the New Mexico Lobos at Kyle Field. Mandatory Credit: Maria Lysaker-Imagn Images | Maria Lysaker-Imagn Images

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Cincinnati Bengals

The Bengals selected Texas A&M defensive end Shemar Stewart in the first round (17th overall) of the 2025 NFL Draft.

Stewart comes in at a humongous 6’5” 267 pounds with out of this world athleticism. He posted a 10.0 relative athletic score, which is the best in NFL Combine history. It’s worth noting that he did not perform his agility drills.

Stewart is an enigma for many because he has the size and athleticism to dominate, but he only had 1.5 sacks this past year and 4.5 sacks over the course of his collegiate career. He also does not come in with elite run stopping numbers but has an elite run defense grade. That makes him very interesting as a prospect to dig into why he’s not producing at the level of his talent.

A Wrecking Ball of Talent

Stewart is immensely talented and it consistently flashed on the film where he would make rare plays with his combination of size and athleticism. He got in the backfield and forced a fumble on the handoff twice!

And he did it at a playing weight of over 270 pounds!

He has an incredible blend of size with explosive athleticism that allows for him to make these plays. It’s hard to find a guy who can do this once in their collegiate career and Stewart did it twice in one season. There just simply are not many human beings who look and move like Stewart. It’s why the Bengals fell in love with him during the draft process.

He’s one of the strongest players in this class as well which was evident when he went against the 7th overall pick Armand Membou who is as strong as an ox as well.

It’s hard to move him off of his spot as a run defender and it might be even harder to maintain your spot as an offensive lineman trying to stop him. Stewart can really do whatever he wants to do on a football field. Here’s another example of his strength coming through where he is in complete control of the entire rep.

His hands shock the right tackle and then he just watches and waits to see where the running back will go. When the back declares that he will go inside of the hard edge set by Stewart, he then sheds inside to make the stop.

His strength is one of his best qualities. Here he knocks the right tackle back against his will to go make another run stop. This strength translates to his pass rushing as well.

When he gets underneath a tackle’s pads on the bull rush it becomes a blood bath for him. There is really no stopping him once he gets in that position because of his strength, length, and athleticism.

The length really works for him as a pass rusher because he can keep the tackle’s hands off of him with a long arm. He can then leverage that position to win inside, outside, or through the lineman. Here he uses it to win outside as the tackle can’t get hands on him so Stewart is able to turn the corner and get to the quarterback. The ball is out so it’s not a sack but it’s an example of how he can win as a pass rusher.

Despite all of this talent, Stewart didn’t really produce at the collegiate level though. Either as a run defender making stops or as a pass rusher finishing sacks. There’s a couple reasons for that and the first one is the scheme of Texas A&M.

Texas A&M’s Scheme

Texas A&M typically asked Stewart to line up in a heavy 5 technique where he is just outside of the shoulder of the tackle, a 6 technique where he is head up with the tight end, or a 4i technique where he is just inside of the tackle. This means that he was generally very tight to the offensive line when he was on the field. This made it very difficult to produce on his own because he’s really just a cog in the defensive machine for the Aggies.

When a defensive end is that tight to the offensive line, it takes away the space they could use to pass rush with. There’s a reason that defensive lines get wider on passing downs. That allows the defensive ends to create a race with the offensive tackle to the spot on the rush. The spot is where the defensive end’s path and the offensive tackle’s path cross. When a guy is out in a wide 9 technique, that spot might be three kicks for the offensive tackle. When a guy is in a tight 5 technique, that spot is right in front of him.

The other reason playing in those tight alignments is difficult is because it’s now easier to double team the defensive end. The guard can be used in those situations to get four hands on the defensive end and end their rush before it gets started.

In this example, Stewart is in a 4i just inside of the tackle. The guard comes over and it’s a double team while they sell run on the play action pass. Stewart reads out the play before splitting the double and getting a pressure on the quarterback. If Stewart was out wide this could not happen to him. It’s too difficult to get a guard to double team a defensive end when he’s out that wide.

The other half of A&M’s scheme that limited Stewart’s pass rushing production is that he was asked to consistently play the run first before rushing the passer. Just like in the example above, Stewart has to stop and read the play out when he sees run action. When he can confirm that it’s a pass play, he can then begin his pass rush. This really limits what Stewart can do in terms of production because college offenses are almost entirely run plays, run pass options, play action passes, and quick game. If he’s not going to rack up sacks on play action passes, then he’s pretty much just left with the drop back passing game which is fading away in the college game due to the rules allowing offensive linemen to get 3 yards downfield on RPOs (which is also enforced sparingly so it’s more like 5-6).

This is also a big reason why Stewart is asked to play so tight to the line and to play the run before rushing the passer. Stopping the run and RPOs in college is how you defend offenses these days. Stopping the passing game isn’t as necessary because it’s just not as prevalent.

With all of that said, Stewart’s run game production was also fairly down and while he is at fault for some of that, the scheme also limits his opportunities to make plays in the run game because of the double teams he was facing. There are countless plays where Stewart was asked to eat a double team so his linebacker could come in unblocked and make the stop.

Here is one of many examples where he is mainly freeing up the second level to make plays. It’s almost like a nose tackle in some ways where their production might not match their play on the field because they are freeing up others to make plays.

Even with the scheme limiting him, there are issues with Stewart’s game that are keeping him from reaching his ceiling.

Finishing Plays

Stewart has a few issues as a player that he needs to work on to better finish plays.

The first issue is that he struggles with finding the ball in the run game where he can either allow the ball carrier to run past him or shed to his secondary gap too quickly allowing the ball carrier to hit his primary gap that he abandoned.

The ball comes right at him on this play and instead of making the stop, he’s fighting with the offensive tackle with his eyes on the offensive tackle. If he had eyes on the ball carrier here he could make a play but instead it gets to the second level. This came up a few times on film where he just could not locate the ball carrier to make a play when he was in position.

Here it is against Will Campbell who was the fourth pick of the draft:

Objectively, Stewart won this rep against Campbell. He gets penetration inside of him and is able to meet the ball carrier in the backfield. The issue for Stewart is he doesn’t see the ball carrier so instead of this being a highlight against one of the best offensive linemen in this draft, it’s nothing because he couldn’t finish this with a tackle.

His other main issue in the run game is shedding to his secondary gap too quickly, here’s an example of that:

He’s on the edge here but once the ball declares inside he should shed that way and help make the stop. The issue is he sheds well before the ball carrier is committed to running inside. Now all he’s done is give up the edge and take himself out of the play.

It’s the same issue on this play:

He has the A gap inside of the guard and is in great position. When the ball carrier looks to be going outside he immediately sheds outside to the B gap. The issue is the ball carrier may have looked like he was going outside, but he had not yet committed to it. This allows the ball carrier to go back inside to the A gap that Stewart just abandoned. Now instead of making a play, he’s taken himself out of the play.

There’s one more issue with Stewart in the run game and that’s his tackling. He had a missed tackle rate of 26.9%. That’s in the bottom 1.5% of draftable players. Now there are occasions where he misses tackles that he had no business being in the position of making such as this play.

That’s a very difficult play to make in general by beating the guard inside that quickly to get penetration back there. It’s not too big of an issue he misses that tackle because he still blew the play up and it was a very difficult tackle to make. The problem is that he didn’t only miss the very difficult tackles to make.

He’s just out of control on this play. He’s going too fast to make the tackle in the flat and once the ball carrier makes a move he is unable to stop himself. This is true for Stewart in a lot of areas that he’s just out of control. These missed tackles also present themselves in his lack of sacks.

He could have added a sack here if he just stayed a little more under control and wrapped up the quarterback. He had him dead to rights, it's just that he missed the tackle.

Here he actually has the quarterback wrapped up, but needs to do a better job of getting him to the ground. These sack opportunities are far and few between so when they arrive a defender needs to make the most of them and capitalize.

The last main problem plaguing Stewart’s game is his refinement as a pass rusher. It’s why he led the team in pressures, but not sacks this season. Getting near the quarterback is one thing but you need to be able to shed the block and beat the offensive lineman to finish with a sack.

He does everything right on this play up to the end. He needs to get the offensive lineman off of him to finish this in a sack. Instead of attempting any move to get hands off of him he just kind of reaches around the tackle and tries to bring the quarterback down despite being blocked. Once in a while that can work in football for an insane highlight but more often than not it ends up like this where it’s a missed opportunity.

On this play his bull rush is difficult for Campbell to handle and he’s in a winning position early in the rep. Rather than leveraging that to then work inside as Campbell is doing everything he can to stop the power rush, he just keeps rushing through Campbell and it compresses the pocket but it’s why he can’t get a clean hit on the quarterback.

There’s also an issue with him of not having his lower half and upper half lined up as a pass rusher. The best rushers in the league constantly have their hips pointed toward the quarterback and are on a straight line path to them. Stewart will often have his hips pointed straight ahead or even outside rather than inside toward the quarterback.

Look at how his hips are not in line with his hands when he makes contact on this long arm bull rush. He needs to line everything up so it all works together instead.

Here’s an example of Stewart attempting a move (cross chop), but he doesn’t have his hips pointed at the quarterback. Instead, he’s got them point straight ahead which makes it harder to then turn that chop into a win around the corner.

Compare that cross chop to this one by Alex Highsmith who consistently has his hips pointed toward the quarterback.

Highsmith never has to flip his hips to turn the corner. He just continues working on the same path. Stewart has to flip his hips after the cross chop to try to turn the corner. That extra time makes his rush worse. It allows the offensive lineman to recover and allows the quarterback a tiny bit more time.

There also is an issue with the timing and placement of his hands on moves as well which is a fairly common issue to have as a young pass rusher.

The swipe is too early on this rep and the left tackle is able to easily punch around that and get his shoulder pad effectively ending the rep. These mistimed moves are littered throughout his tape and another reason he’s struggled to produce as a pass rusher.

Lastly, the placement of his moves will be lacking at times.

This bull is ineffective in large part because his hand is way up on the shoulder pad. You can see the force he’s putting out is mostly absorbed by the shoulder pad moving rather than the right guard getting moved. If he can get better with his hands in terms of timing and placement, he will see more production as a pass rusher.

Bottom Line

He’s a very unrefined player. The scheme certainly deserves some of the blame and he would have seen more production if he was able to play out wide more often, but he also deserves blame for not finishing plays. He had opportunities as shown by his team leading pressure numbers, but he could not convert those pressures into anything more substantial. Similarly he plays run blocks very well and sets a hard edge but he needs to do a better job of locating the ball and making the tackle to turn those good reps into production.

Stewart might just be the most talented defensive end in this class in terms of athletic ability and strength. He just needs someone to guide him to the next level through refinement, consistency, and being put in a position to succeed.

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Mike Santagata
MIKE SANTAGATA

Mike Santagata is an offensive line and film expert. He's written and analyzed Bengals film for the past four years. He also hosts the Always Gameday in Cincinnati podcast and is a regular guest on the Locked On Bengals podcast.

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