School: Texas
Year: Sr
Position: CB

Physical Attributes

• Height: 6-1
• Weight: 186
• RAS: 8.99
• 40 Time: 4.39

Rankings

• Joe’s Ranking: 6.1
• Consensus Position Rank: 5
• My Position Ranking: 8
• Difference in Ranking: -3
• Tier: 5
• Projected Round: 4

Games Watched

• Iowa State ’23
• Michigan ’24
• Florida ’24
• Georgia ’24

Ryan’s Notes

Positives

• Powerful lower half, he’s built like a safety and this combined with his athleticism allows him to fit where the Texas defense needed him. He played in the slot in his junior year and in his senior year it was a mix of outside, slot and linebacker.
• He was used to cover tight ends with some good tape shown against Colston Loveland in the Michigan game.
• Even though I think a number of his interceptions were lucky, he still had to have the ball skills and reaction times to capitalise on these opportunities.

Negatives

• He is too much of a tweener to spend any real draft capital on, as I mentioned in the summary he has limitations across all areas and whilst that’s a meritable quality for a backup, to be a starter worthy of a top 50 pick he would need to have at least one area of consistency.
• For a bigger defensive back with powerful legs I would have expected him to be more accomplished as a tackler. This is an inconsistent part of his game. Also even though he makes some technically sound form tackles, he loses the contact battle too often for my liking. I wouldn’t trust him against running backs in space for example.
• I think his awareness and processing needs to be faster to be a zone corner in the NFL.
• This also extends to when he lined up in the box as linebacker, he didn’t seem to understand his role in the run fits whenever he was asked to have a gap responsibility. As Barron found out; it’s not easy going from a pass first to a run first player.
• Whilst Barron moves well he is not fluid in coverage, he stop-starts too often and seems to naturally want to be flat footed to survey the field without the distraction of motion.

Ryan’s Summary

Barron is a puzzle I’d leave for someone else to solve if I was a NFL talent evaluator. He’s clearly a skilled athlete that impresses in drills but he’s positionless in a bad way. Don’t mistake this for versatility. He’s too short and not technical enough to play man on the outside and he’s too weak and too poor of an open field tackler to play the nickel. Where I see his best abilities are as a Cover 3 corner, he plays well out of shuffle but this still needs a lot of refining especially as he doesn’t look comfortable with zone turns and letting receivers behind his hips. He likes to play the ball from outside to in and he’ll get that chance in a system like this.