Byron
Murphy II.
Byron
Murphy II.
Texas
"Murphy is a wrestler in a defensive tackle's body: he wins the leverage battle before the guard's hands arrive, and the burst that starts the rush is the same burst that finishes it."Pre-draft read
Interior disruptor who aligned everywhere from 0-tech to 4i in the Texas front but did his best work as a penetrating three-technique. Wins with a violent first step and natural pad level: he is under the guard's chest before the hand fight starts, and his hips let him flatten into the backfield without losing his feet.
Second trait is play strength out of proportion to his frame. He anchors against down blocks, resets the line of scrimmage on the bull, and works flat down the line against zone runs. As a rusher he counters with a long-arm and a snatch-trap once the guard oversets. The signature is the closing burst — he finishes the rep as fast as he starts it, which is why so many of his pressures turn into sacks.
Attacking one-gap 4-3/nickel front built on interior penetration
Year 1: rotational interior rusher on 40-45 snaps, kicked inside on passing downs. Ceiling: full-time three-technique and the primary interior pass-rush threat on a playoff defense.
A two-gap 3-4 that asks him to read-and-react over the center on early downs; his arm length and rush-first instincts get neutralized when he is told to hold ground instead of attack a gap.
Value spikes when he is paired with edge rushers who can win outside, since his pressure pushes quarterbacks up into the pocket.
Texas DT Byron Murphy II 2023 Highlights
Breakout junior season reel: get-off, gap penetration and finish.
Byron Murphy II 2023 Season Highlights | Texas DT
Full-season cut showing alignment versatility across the Texas front.
Texas DT Byron Murphy II Vs Alabama: All Pass Rushes
Every pass-rush rep against Alabama — best look at the hand plan.
Byron Murphy II is a compact, dense interior lineman whose football identity is leverage and launch. He is not a length prospect and never pretended to be one; he plays like a wrestler who found a football field, staying low, striking first and turning a two-way go into a decision the guard makes too late.
The production curve tells the story. He rotated as a freshman, held up as a sophomore in a crowded room, then broke out on the 2023 playoff team with 29 tackles, 8.5 tackles for loss and five sacks across 14 games as the disruptive centerpiece of a Big 12 title defense. The flags were real too: short arms let quality guards latch and steer him once the rep stalls, and the frame invited questions about a full 700-snap workload as a nose-shaded body.
The board consensus had him as the first or second interior defender off the shelf, a late-teens to mid-20s value with All-Pro pass-rush upside and a floor tied to how much his length limited him. Seattle taking him at sixteen was aggressive relative to positional value but clean on evaluation: they wanted a penetrator to play behind a rebuilt front, not a two-gap plugger, and he was the best version of that in the class.
- 01
First-step explosion
elite get-off out of a low stance that puts him in the guard's frame before the punch lands and forces interior blockers to open early.
- 02
Leverage and pad level
naturally low center of gravity lets him win the leverage battle almost every snap, so double teams struggle to lift him out of the gap.
- 03
Play strength
dense lower half and heavy hands let him reset the line on the bull rush and stack down blocks despite giving up length to most guards.
- 04
Closing burst
finishes at the quarterback rather than arriving late, which is why his pressure rate converted to real sack production in 2023.
- 05
Positional flexibility
took reps from 0-tech to 4i at Texas and can be moved along the front by game plan without losing his rush identity.
- 01
Arm length
short arms let long, patient guards latch first and steer him off track once the initial burst does not create immediate displacement.
- 02
Counter menu
leaned heavily on the get-off and long-arm; the secondary and tertiary moves were still being built at the time of the evaluation.
- 03
Snap-count workload
body type and rush style raised fair questions about whether he could carry a full-time interior role without heavy rotation.
- 04
Hand reset
when the first strike misses he can get stuck absorbing rather than shedding, which shows up on second-level zone runs away from him.
| Yr | Team | G | Tkl | Sk | Int | PD | FF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Texas | 12 | 15 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | Texas | 13 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | Texas | 14 | 29 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Career | — | 39 | 70 | 8 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
Sports Reference (CFB). Three seasons at Texas, 2021-2023; season totals sum exactly to career totals. Pass breakups, forced fumbles and recoveries only logged for 2023.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Undersized interior penetrator who makes his living on the get-off and finishes reps quickly — the most honest match for the role and the body.
Only as a stylistic outlier: same leverage-and-launch identity from a compact frame, without the historic length-defying strength.
If length keeps him from separating, a leverage-based run-down interior contributor who plays 500 quality snaps but never carries the rush.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Seattle rotated him carefully as a rookie. He played 14 games with nine starts in 2024, mostly at nose in a front that asked him to occupy rather than penetrate, and the box score reflected it: 36 tackles, two tackles for loss and half a sack. It looked like a slow start for a mid-first pick, but the tape showed a defender being used against his best trait. The 2025 season fixed that. Moved to a true three-technique and left alone in one-on-one situations, he started all 17 games and produced 62 tackles, seven tackles for loss, 13 quarterback hits and seven sacks, then added two more sacks in three playoff games.
In hindsight the pick reads better than the value chart suggested at the time. The length concerns were legitimate and still show up against the best guards in the league, but they never became the ceiling anyone feared, because the get-off and the finish are real NFL traits and not college-only advantages. The lesson is about deployment more than evaluation: a year of nose reps hid what a year of three-technique reps unlocked, and the difference between a slow rookie season and a breakout second year was scheme, not development.
Data note: Sports Reference (CFB). Three seasons at Texas, 2021-2023; season totals sum exactly to career totals. Pass breakups, forced fumbles and recoveries only logged for 2023.