YaYa Diaby will be key in getting Buccaneers' pass rush back on track
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers' 2023 draft class is filled with tons of potential, but it's also filled with athleticism and mostly, speed.Especially on defense. "We’ve still got some size in there but we’ve got more quickness now," head coach Todd Bowles told reporters Friday. "You’re playing more college quarterbacks and college people every week and […]
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers' 2023 draft class is filled with tons of potential, but it's also filled with athleticism and mostly, speed.
Especially on defense.
"We’ve still got some size in there but we’ve got more quickness now," head coach Todd Bowles told reporters Friday. "You’re playing more college quarterbacks and college people every week and we had to get faster up front – not necessarily 4.4 [40-yard dash time] fast, but faster at certain positions.
"We thought we did that."
The Bucs' first-round pick, Calijah Kancey, is a unicorn when it comes to what he can do at his position. He should be able to help the team at a high level for years to come.
But it's the Buccaneers' third-rounder, YaYa Diaby, who may end up being the best player of the entire class.
Diaby is an athletic freak that is also 6-foot-3, 263-pounds and runs a 4.51 – he has traits that you just don't typically see in a guy his size. He also has one of the core traits for edge rushers, which is speed to power. In all, the guy has the total package to become a Pro Bowler in the NFL. It's just a matter of when he can put it all together.
"He’s a very good athlete, he’s very strong – he’s got speed to power, which is hard to find," general manager Jason Licht said after the selection of Diaby. "I’ve found over the years that the guys who don’t make it don’t have an element of power. You can be fast as hell off the edge, but if you don’t have any power to combine with it then you get figured out by NFL tackles. He’s got speed, he’s got power and he’s got great effort.”
And the Buccaneers plan on utilizing him in every way possible.
"Obviously, his size, he grew up to about 264 [pounds] and he can still run. We see him as an outside linebacker in base, he can help us in sub, he can also go inside some," head coach Todd Bowles told reporters Friday. "So, as he gets acclimated to the system, it's just a matter of what are the tools that he has to see if we can move him around or leave him in one spot or add anything. But he has heavy hands, he's a load to handle and he can run so that gives us some hope."
"We see a lot of different roles for him," defensive line coach Kacey Rodgers said recently. "Now, you’re going through the exercise of do we want to play left and right? Do we want to play SAM and WILL because of the different pieces we’ve got? Which is kind of a fun exercise to go through because we feel like now we can create some matchups that could be favorable for us.”
In other words: Diaby is going to do a little bit of everything, which is new territory for him.
"At Louisville, I didn't get that opportunity a lot – to just be free," Diaby told reporters. "Now I have that opportunity and I'm ready to put everything forward."
Diaby is coming off the best season of his collegiate career in which he recorded 9.0 sacks and 31 total pressures, per Pro Football Focus. He also finished with a 13.0% pass rush productivity rate and a 24.7% win rate against true pass sets, which ranked him 28th and 37th, respectively, out of 126 qualifying players with at least 263 pass rush snaps during the 2022 season. The Bucs need a viable EDGE3 behind Joe Tryon-Shoyinka and Anthony Nelson until Shaquil Barrett returns to form from his 2022 Achilles injury. But, they still need a good rotational option like Diaby once Barrett returns, anyway.
And if Diaby's skillset isn't scary enough, he wants to emulate the likes of Myles Garrett, Khalil Mack, and Nick Bosa, which should terrify any opposing offense and its offensive linemen.
The future is as bright as ever for Diaby and, if he can turn into the player the Buccaneers envision, the pass rush as a whole will get back to what we've been used to seeing since Bowles arrived in 2019.
