Teez Tabor

Florida cornerback Teez Tabor has drawn comparisons to Detroit Lions cornerback Darius Slay based on his size, aggressiveness and willingness to talk a big game on and off the field.

(AP Photo)

INDIANAPOLIS -- Teez Tabor is long, lanky and full of attitude. He's what the Detroit Lions could be looking for in a first-round cornerback to pair with Darius Slay.

In fact, in many ways, he is Slay as a prospect.

Both came from Southeastern Conference schools, Slay from Mississippi State and Tabor from Florida. Both had impressive size, measuring 6 feet tall. Both had the 32-inch arms teams love for press coverage.

Both dared teams to throw their way and often made them pay. Both could get beat by the long ball, that confidence thrown right back in their face.

Draft season is all about making long projections, trying to match a prospect to the realized form of himself in the pros. NFL.com's Lance Zierlein chose Slay as his match for Tabor.

Darius Slay

Tabor is currently projected to go right around where Slay was drafted, in the fourth pick of the second round to Detroit in 2013. And as the Lions are looking to both fix one of the leakiest pass defenses as well as infuse their defense with playmakers, the prospect who reminds them of their own could be worth a deep look.

Like many teams in a league that's trending toward bigger cornerbacks, the Lions are scouting this year's loaded cornerback class with a keen interest in height. They have a serviceable No. 2 option in Nevin Lawson, but he stands just 5 feet 9.

Every part of Tabor's game stands tall. Whereas many prospects at the Scouting Combine claimed they were the best player at their position, Tabor took it a step farther by declaring himself the best at any of them.

Move aside, Myles Garrett.

Nobody in the Lions locker room talks a bigger game than "Big Play" Slay. Nobody at the combine spoke bigger than Tabor, who said he felt disrespected when teams would throw at him instead of Buccaneers first-round pick Vernon Hargreaves III and claimed that "it's hard to not like a player like me."

He's never been afraid to speak what's on his mind, once taking to Twitter to claim that Florida's athletic department "sucks" and once to compare college football to slavery, a comment he later deleted and apologized for.

The brash attitude has built a closet full of red flags. Tabor failed a drug test before his freshman year at Florida and was suspended, then skipped a test the next season and was suspended again. He missed another game this past season after he got into a practice fight with a teammate.

"That's the only type of questions I get in the interviews," Tabor said. "I just tell them that you have to go through growing pains in life. I am not saying I am glad I made those mistakes, but they definitely made me the man I am today.

"We all make mistakes in life, but it's never a mistake as long as you don't make it two times. I don't feel like I made the same mistake twice. That means I learned from my mistake."

With a failed drug test and a missed drug test on the table, teams are going to take that line of questioning further and further.

This is the part of Tabor's game that doesn't match Slay, who has always been able to turn his attitude into playful chatter. Tabor's is more fiery.

His questions are similar to the ones that targeted Marcus Peters as he was coming out of Washington two years ago. Peters became a first-round pick of the Kansas City Chiefs anyway and has since channeled that aggression to become an All-Pro, but teams are going to continue to vet anyone they see as potential locker-room issues.

Like Slay, Tabor talks a big game and has the skill set to back it up. Unlike Slay, he's going to have to use his words to explain why it won't all make him a problem at the next level.