Most Interesting Prospects: South Carolina Safety Nick Emmanwori

I wrestled with this year’s safety class on the most recent episode of Blue 58 and came away convinced of two things. First, there aren’t many safeties that hit our traditional thresholds (not at the top of the draft, anyway). And second, we’re almost certainly missing out on some guys.

It’s no secret that I prioritize athleticism in our pre-draft scouting (if you can call it scouting). It’s relatively easy to measure and it correlates strongly with NFL performance. It turns out athleticism is important in professional athletics. What a shock, right?

But what do you do when the athleticism metrics show that there aren’t many elite athletes at a given position, but the production metrics paint the opposite picture? That’s what we have at safety this year — there are practically no elite athletes at the top of the draft board, but the safeties that are near the top perform exceptionally well in our production numbers. If we prioritize athleticism, we’re almost certainly narrowing the pool unnecessarily.

So how do we solve that? I don’t know, but the safety I like most in this class is the one guy who not only surpasses our athleticism threshold, but shatters it. That’s South Carolina’s Nick Emmanwori.

Emmanwori is an athletic marvel, recording a perfect 10 Relative Athletic Score. Well, maybe not entirely perfect. Emmanwori, like a growing number of prospects, declined to do the agility drills at the Combine, leaving us with an incomplete picture of his athletic profile. 

But even if running those drills dropped his score from “technically perfect” to merely “extremely impressive,” we’d still have quite an athlete on our hands. Every inch of 6-foot-3 and a muscular 220 pounds, Emmanwori is the picture of a box safety. What else do you want? He’s big, he’s long, he’s fast, he’s strong. Seriously, he’s strong: he put up 20 reps on the bench press. Even if that doesn’t perfectly translate into playing strength, he can move some weight. He’s got the physical tools to do what needs doing.

And, more often than not, he did the job well at South Carolina. As charted by Pro Football Focus, his coverage grades improved every year (peaking with a stellar 86.8 his final year as a Gamecock) and he cleaned up the weakest part of his game: missed tackles. In his first year on duty, he missed just over 13% of his tackle attempts, but he cut that to 6.8% and 7.2% over his final two seasons.

The concerns on Emmanwori are twofold. First, he made comparably few plays on the ball relative to his peers. We look for at least 20 career ballhawks (sacks, interceptions, fumbles forced, and passes defensed) among safety prospects, and while other top safeties in the 2025 class easily cleared that bar, Emmanwori only recorded 17 career ballhawks. It wasn’t for lack of playing time — he’s got more than 2,000 career defensive snaps under his belt, so it’s not like he’s some sort of rapid riser in the draft based on a final solid season or something. He just simply didn’t make as many plays as other top safeties in the class.

The second is his physical dimensions. Emmanwori is tall and heavy, and there are according concerns that come with that territory. Bigger, longer safeties tend to be a little bit slow to change directions, which makes sense if you give it any amount of thought. It’s hard to get a long-levered body to move the same way a smaller one does. That’s a liability for a player who needs a lot of change-of-direction ability playing in the box and in the slot, and it’s fair to assume from testing alone that Emmanwori probably struggles in that area. Refusing to run the agility drills tells you everything you need to know on that front.

But neither of those concerns is a kiss of death. He’s still a physical marvel and he showed he can get the job done at South Carolina. The bigger career determinant for Emmanwori is probably going to be where he ends up landing. If he ends up working under a savvy defensive coordinator that works to find him a role where he can excel, he probably will. But if he lands with a team that sees him as just an uber-athlete that can solve any problem they have on defense, he’ll probably end up having a career arc similar to Isaiah Simmons. 

Simmons, too, was once an athletic marvel billed as a guy who could do anything. Instead, he hasn’t ended up doing much of anything, possibly because teams expected too much in the first place. That’s the problem with the ultra-athletes: it’s true that it’s important to be athletic, but it doesn’t make you Superman. If he lands in a position where he can be just a safety and not a superhero, Emmanwori will have already taken one significant step toward success.