Ohio State linebacker Sonny Styles just blew the doors off the NFL Combine, and now the hype machine is running on premium fuel. You can bet that defensive coordinators are already getting a little too excited about what that kind of explosiveness could unlock.
And look, this isn’t me raining on anyone's parade. I'm no fun police. Styles might become the best LB the league has seen since Ray Lewis. He might be exactly what a team like the New York Giants needs in the middle of their defense. But every time a “positionless” athletic unicorn lights up the Combine, I can’t help but think about how this story has played out before.
So before we start engraving his name into a top-five pick, let’s take a quick walk through a fairy tale that didn’t quite end the way people expected.
So, without further ado, I give you:
The Caution-Fairy Tale of Sonny Styles
Once upon a time, in a land where men in shorts jump very high for no real reason, a linebacker named Sonny Styles decided to simply ignore physics.
He leapt 43.5 inches into the sky. He broad-jumped 11 feet and 2 inches because 11 feet just wasn’t far enough. He ran a 4.46 40-yard dash at 244 pounds just to make sure every scout, coach, general manager, and insider at the combine spit out their coffee.
The scrolls were updated. The mock drafts were rewritten. The kingdom declared, “Behold, a unicorn!”
And the unicorn was magnificent.
He was taller than Mike Evans. Faster than George Pickens. More explosive than Derwin James. A 6-foot-5, 244-pound blur with a 40-plus vertical and an 11-foot broad jump. The only one of his kind since the year 2003 (according to NFL researcher), which in Combine years might as well be medieval times.
But gather round, children, because this tale has been told before.
There was once another unicorn who roamed between the sidelines. His name was Isaiah Simmons.
He ran a 4.39 at 238 pounds and made defensive coordinators believe they had solved football. He was called a weapon. A Swiss Army knife. A positionless chess piece. The Arizona Cardinals selected him eighth overall in 2020 in the hopes of defending their kingdom from their sworn enemies.
Instead, they built too many castles in the kingdom and never decided which one was his to defend.
Linebacker on Monday. Safety on Tuesday. Nickel on Wednesday. By Year 3, nobody in the land of sand quite knew what he was anymore. By Year 5, he had made his way to the big city, where he was blocking kicks and fighting for snaps as a glorified special teamer. By Year 6, he was fighting for a roster spot just to stay in the league.
The moral of this story is not that Sonny Styles will follow the same path. He tackles better. He diagnoses plays faster. He looks more like Big Blue's next star linebacker than a jack-of-all-trades science experiment.
Fairy tales love freak numbers, but the NFL loves clarity, direction, and a real plan. Players don’t stick around on traits alone.
If Styles lands with a coach who gives him a throne and a job description (did someone say John Harbaugh), he might rule the middle of a defense for the next decade. If he lands somewhere that tries to throw everything at him all at once, the clock starts ticking.
And so the kingdom waits. Because February might crown kings, but September makes them earn it.
So maybe, just maybe, this time the unicorn really does live happily ever after.