Alton
Robinson.
Alton
Robinson.
Syracuse· 6'3"· 264 lb· 4.69s 40
"A junior-college transfer whose ten-sack ACC junior season came from pure get-off and bend, and whose senior drop to 4.5 left teams guessing which year was real."Pre-draft read
Robinson is a 6-3, 259-pound edge rusher whose game is get-off and closing burst. He times the snap as well as any defensive end in the class, and when he beats a tackle's first step he has the ankle flexion to lean through the corner and finish, which is how he produced seventeen tackles for loss in a single ACC season.
Everything else is a work in progress. His hand usage is raw, so once a tackle gets a clean set on him he lacks the counter and the power to reset the rep, and he can be reached and washed in the run game by linemen who catch his shoulder. At 259 pounds he is a situational body more than a base end, and his production went the wrong way as a senior, from ten sacks to 4.5. The signature is the first three steps.
A four-man front that rotates its edge rushers and can use him as a wide-nine designated rusher rather than asking him to set an edge on early downs.
Year 1 situational third-down rusher behind veteran starters, with a ceiling as a starting weakside end who gets eight sacks with a developed counter.
A two-gap front that asks its ends to hold the point at 300-plus pounds and play run first on every snap.
Alton Robinson NFL Draft Tape | Syracuse Defensive End
Conference cut-up assembled for the pre-draft cycle, showing the get-off and the bend.
Alton Robinson 2018 Full Season Highlights
The seventeen-tackle-for-loss, ten-sack junior year that earned second-team All-ACC.
Alton Robinson & Kendall Coleman: The Best DE Tandem in the Nation?
Context on the Syracuse edge pairing that produced his best pressure numbers.
Robinson took a junior-college route to the ACC, starting at Northeast Oklahoma A&M before landing at Syracuse, where he became half of the most productive edge tandem in the conference alongside Kendall Coleman.
The junior year is the reason he got drafted. He started twelve games in 2018 and led the team with seventeen tackles for loss and ten sacks, earning second-team All-ACC honors on a defense that produced pressure from both edges. The senior season did not follow the curve: he started twelve games again in 2019 and dropped to 9.5 tackles for loss and 4.5 sacks, settling for honorable mention all-conference. Evaluators split on whether the drop was scheme, attention from opposing tackles, or the ceiling showing itself.
He had a personal connection to the team that eventually took him. Through former Syracuse teammate Zaire Franklin he began training at Ford Sports Performance in Bellevue after the 2019 season, where Bobby Wagner and K.J. Wright work out and where he spent time with Cliff Avril; he had also been a high school teammate of Seahawks cornerback Tre Flowers. Seattle, coming off a 28-sack season and already having traded up for Darrell Taylor, took him at 148 as the second edge of the class.
- 01
Explosive get-off
Times the snap as well as any edge in the class and forces tackles to open their hips before they are set.
- 02
Corner flexibility
Bends through the arc rather than running around it, which is what turned pressure into finished sacks in 2018.
- 03
Peak production
Led Syracuse with seventeen tackles for loss and ten sacks as a junior, good for second-team All-ACC honors.
- 04
Closing burst
Covers ground to the quarterback quickly once he wins the edge, with the acceleration to catch a scrambler from behind.
- 05
Junior-college resilience
Rebuilt his path through Northeast Oklahoma A&M and arrived at Syracuse ready to start immediately in the ACC.
- 01
Raw hand usage
Has no reliable counter when his first move is stopped, which lets a settled tackle end the rep on contact.
- 02
Run defense
Gets reached and washed by linemen who catch his shoulder, keeping him off the field on early downs.
- 03
Senior-year regression
Dropped from ten sacks to 4.5 as a senior, raising questions about whether the junior year was the true level.
- 04
Frame and length
At 259 pounds with 32 1/2-inch arms he lacks the mass to hold up as a base end in a heavy front.
Relative Athletic Score (Kent Lee Platte) benchmarks combine/pro-day numbers against every measured prospect at the position since 1987. 10.00 is elite; 5.00 is average.
— — — positional median (p50)
- 40 yd
- 4.69sp50
- Vertical
- 35.5inp50
- Broad jump
- 119inp50
- Three-cone
- 7.32sp50
- Shuttle
- 4.32sp50
- Bench
- 25repp50
| Yr | Team | G | Tkl | Sk | Int | PD | FF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Syracuse | — | 0 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | Syracuse | — | 0 | 4.5 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Career | — | — | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The Seahawks draft release documents his two Syracuse starting seasons: twelve starts with a team-leading 17 tackles for loss and 10 sacks in 2018 (second-team All-ACC), and twelve starts with 9.5 tackles for loss and 4.5 sacks in 2019 (honorable mention). He began his college career at Northeast Oklahoma A&M, a junior college whose statistics were not published in the sources checked, and no verified season-by-season line exists for his earlier Syracuse years, so career totals are left empty rather than assembled from partial data. One report described a 19-sack college career, but that figure could not be reconciled against verified season lines and is not recorded here.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
A situational rusher who carves out a long career as a rotational four-to-six-sack edge across several teams.
The ceiling: a lighter speed rusher who turns get-off into a decade of double-digit-sack seasons in the right front.
A young Seattle edge whose flashes never become a full-time role before the roster moves on.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
The rookie year looked like a steal. Robinson played fourteen games in 2020 in a reserve role behind Carlos Dunlap and L.J. Collier and finished with 22 tackles, four sacks and a forced fumble, and his first career sack came at a clutch moment in a close game. The second season went sideways: sixteen games, 22 tackles, one sack and a nagging knee problem he played through for most of the second half.
Then came the injury that ended it. He was having a strong preseason in 2022 when he went down with a knee injury in the exhibition finale against Dallas and missed the entire season on injured reserve. He never participated in the 2023 offseason program, and Pete Carroll said at the close of minicamp that Robinson could not yet run; Seattle waived him on the eve of training camp in July. He finished with 30 NFL games, 44 tackles and five sacks, all of it before his twenty-fifth birthday. This is not a scouting miss so much as a medical one: the rush traits translated exactly as the fifth round hoped, and a knee took the career before the evaluation could be settled.