Cj
West.
Cj
West.
Indiana· 6'1"· 316 lb· 4.95s 40
"A stout nose tackle with an elite anchor against the run, West’s value is tied directly to his ability to consistently occupy blockers and allow linebackers to flow freely."Pre-draft read
West is a compact, low-slung interior lineman who plays the run the way the position was drawn up. At 6-1 and 316 pounds he wins the leverage battle before contact, firing out with a flat back, landing thick hands inside and stacking centers where they stand. He does not get moved off the spot, and he squeezes the A-gap without surrendering his own responsibility.
He is more athletic than the body type suggests — 28 bench reps and a 33-inch vertical at that weight — and he flashes short-area quickness that lets him slant across a face and beat reach blocks. What he does not have is length. Thirty-one-and-a-half-inch arms mean guards get into his frame first, and his pass rush is a push-and-collapse operation without a finishing move.
The 4-3 one-gap attacking front with an emphasis on penetrating upfield and disrupting the backfield is where CJ West could thrive.
Initially a rotational interior lineman who can clog run lanes, primarily as a 1-tech, but projects as a future starting 3-tech due to his quickness for his size.
A traditional 3-4 two-gap defense asks West to read and react rather than penetrate, neutering his primary strength.
West's explosive first step and ability to displace blockers make him a natural fit for schemes that prioritize upfield aggression from their interior defensive linemen.
CJ West College Football Highlights💥 | Indiana Defensive Tackle
Game film cut-up of CJ West's Indiana tape.
CJ West Midseason Rookie Highlights | NFL 2025 - 2026
Game film cut-up of CJ West's Indiana tape.
C.J. West & Alfred Collins Sacks of Philip Rivers - Week 16 @ Indianapolis Colts - 49ers - 2025
Game film cut-up of CJ West's Indiana tape.
West is a five-year, two-program evaluation with an unusually clean profile for a day-three interior lineman. Fifty-two games, 150 tackles, 27 tackles for loss and nine sacks between Kent State and Indiana, and almost none of it came from being schemed free.
Most of the tape is MAC tape. He arrived at Kent State in 2020, broke out in 2021 with 42 tackles, nine TFL and five sacks, then spent two more seasons as the best player on bad teams — 4.5 and six TFL in years where the defense around him kept collapsing. The one-year transfer to Indiana was the answer to the level-of-competition question, and he passed it: 13 games, 42 tackles, 7.5 TFL and two sacks as the interior anchor on a defense that went 11-1 in the regular season and reached the College Football Playoff.
The testing backed the tape. Twenty-eight reps on the bench, a 33-inch vertical and a 4.95 forty at 316 pounds is a functional-power profile, not a workout-warrior one. The knocks were the ones the frame dictates: sub-32-inch arms, a pass-rush plan that lives on bull rushes, and a fifth-year age curve that caps the projection. Teams graded him as a plug-in nose with rotational upside, and San Francisco took him at 113 to feed a front that rotates interior bodies hard.
- 01
Anchor
Wide, low base and a flat back let him stack centers on down blocks and hold the A-gap without ceding ground.
- 02
Natural leverage
At 6-1 he starts every rep under the blocker's pads, which is how a 316-pound body wins against bigger guards.
- 03
Functional power
Twenty-eight bench reps and heavy hands that jolt on contact and reset the line of scrimmage on first down.
- 04
Short-area quickness
Slants and beats reach blocks across a face better than his weight suggests, worth 27 career TFL.
- 05
Availability and toughness
Fifty-two games across five seasons with no meaningful missed time, and he answered the level question at Indiana.
- 01
Arm length
Thirty-one-and-a-half-inch arms let NFL guards get into his chest first and control the rep before he can extend.
- 02
Pass-rush plan
Push-and-collapse rusher with no reliable counter or finishing move; nine sacks in five years is the honest total.
- 03
Level of competition
Four of his five seasons came in the MAC, so the Power Four sample is a single year of tape.
- 04
Age and ceiling
A fifth-year senior body already close to its physical peak, which limits how much projection teams could add.
— — — positional median (p50)
- 40 yd
- 4.95sp50
- Vertical
- 33inp50
- Broad jump
- —in
- Three-cone
- —s
- Shuttle
- —s
- Bench
- 28repp50
| Yr | Team | G | Tkl | Sk | Int | PD | FF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Kent State | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | Kent State | 14 | 42 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | Kent State | 10 | 26 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | Kent State | 12 | 39 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | Indiana | 13 | 42 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Career | — | 52 | 150 | 9 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Rotational early-down interior body with functional power and limited pass-rush production.
Squatty run-plugger from a smaller program who grew into a full-time starting nose on a good front.
Short-armed run specialist whose lack of a rush plan keeps him a bottom-of-the-roster rotation piece.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
San Francisco used him the way a fourth-round interior lineman is supposed to be used. West played 14 games as a rookie without a start, logging 21 tackles, two tackles for loss and a sack in a rotation that kept him fresh on early downs, then held his role into January: two playoff games, five tackles, two TFL and another sack. Producing more in two postseason games than in most of his regular-season month is a small sample, but it is the kind of small sample that gets a young lineman more snaps.
In hindsight the pick reads as exactly the low-variance selection it was graded to be. Nothing about year one contradicted the evaluation — the run defense showed up, the arm length still shows up on tape against long guards, and the pass rush remains a bull rush without a plan. What the rookie year proved is that the MAC-to-Power-Four concern was noise; he can hold up against NFL interior blockers right now. Whether he becomes more than a two-down piece depends on hands he has not shown yet.