By Austin Gayle



Pro Football Focus



High cut with elephant trunks for arms, Oregon’s 6-foot-6, 245-pound Jalen Jelks doesn’t fit the cookie-cutter mold for an FBS defensive lineman. He is taller and longer than the prototypical edge rusher and much leaner than the standard for interior defensive linemen. Despite his coming-out party in 2017, Jelks and his atypical frame played out of position for most of the season, merely scratching the surface of his NFL potential.



A consensus three-star defensive tackle coming out of Arizona’s Desert Vista High School in 2014, Jelks took a redshirt year before taking on depth roles in 2015 and 2016, as he totaled just 395 defensive snaps over that two-year span. Though he played 16 of 108 defensive snaps along the edge of the line of scrimmage as a redshirt freshman in 2015, Oregon cast him at edge defender for a majority of his sophomore season, lining him outside the tackles on 234 of his 287 defensive...