Patrick
Queen.
Patrick
Queen.
LSU· 6'0"· 229 lb· 4.50s 40
"A one-year starter who waited behind a Butkus winner and then played his best football in the national championship game, with coverage skill no other linebacker in the class could match."Pre-draft read
Speed linebacker who played the game in a hurry. He diagnosed run keys fast, shot gaps before blockers could climb, and ran the alley at a pace that turned four-yard runs into one-yard runs. Blitzing off the edge or through the A gap, he timed snaps well and arrived with more pop than his listed weight suggested.
Coverage was the separator from the rest of the class. He dropped fluidly, opened and ran with backs and tight ends, and closed to the flat quickly enough to make throws in front of him unprofitable. The weakness was contact: he got uprooted by climbing guards and washed out of gaps when a lineman reached his frame. The signature was the finish: twenty tackles and five for loss across Georgia, Oklahoma and Clemson.
Nickel-based defense with a two-gapping front that keeps him clean, letting him run the alley, match backs in coverage and blitz off timing.
Year 1: three-down starter and coverage linebacker. Ceiling: Pro Bowl signal caller who removes the middle of the field from an offense.
Two-gap 3-4 that asks him to take on guards head-up in a phone booth, where his frame turns every gap-scheme run into a problem.
He is a run-and-cover linebacker, not a stack-and-shed one, and the front has to be built accordingly.
Patrick Queen 2019 LSU Highlights
The single starting season that produced the first-round grade.
2020 CFP National Championship Defensive MVP: Patrick Queen
Every snap from the title-game performance against Clemson.
Patrick Queen draft breakdown
Pre-draft film breakdown of the coverage traits that separated him from the class.
Queen was the least experienced first-round linebacker in the 2020 class and, to several teams, the best one. He waited two years behind Devin White, started four of LSU's last five games in 2018, and only took over the middle for good in 2019 after an injury to Michael Divinity.
What followed was one full season of starting football and a first-round grade. He finished 2019 with 85 tackles, 12 tackles for loss, three sacks, an interception and a fumble recovery on a 15-0 national championship defense, and he got better every month. Over the final three games against Georgia, Oklahoma and Clemson he combined for 20 tackles and five tackles for loss, taking Defensive Player of the Game honors in the title win over Clemson.
The file was clean and the concerns were narrow. At 6-0 and 229 pounds he was undersized for the position, he got moved by bigger blockers, and he had one year of starting tape rather than three. Daniel Jeremiah ranked him 15th overall on the strength of the coverage fluidity and the burst. Baltimore, which had spent years without a true three-down linebacker, took him 28th overall as the immediate replacement for C.J. Mosley.
- 01
Coverage fluidity
Opens and runs with backs and tight ends, drops with balance and closes to the flat fast enough to erase easy throws.
- 02
Diagnosis and burst
Reads run keys quickly and shoots the gap before the guard can climb, beating blockers to the spot rather than defeating them.
- 03
Blitz timing
Times the snap on interior and edge pressures, generating three sacks and twelve tackles for loss as a first-year starter.
- 04
Late-season arc
Combined for twenty tackles and five for loss across Georgia, Oklahoma and Clemson, peaking on the largest stages available.
- 05
Communication
Took over the pre-snap calls for a national championship defense within months of becoming a full-time starter.
- 01
Play strength
At 229 pounds he gets uprooted by climbing guards and washed out of gaps once a lineman reaches his chest plate.
- 02
Block deconstruction
Beats blockers with speed rather than hands, so when he is late the rep is over before it starts.
- 03
Experience
One full season as a starter, which leaves teams projecting the processing rather than confirming it across multiple years.
- 04
Pursuit angles
Overruns plays when he trusts his speed too much, taking paths that let ball carriers cut back behind him.
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
- 4.50sp50
- Vertical
- 35inp50
- Broad jump
- 125inp50
- Three-cone
- —s
- Shuttle
- —s
- Bench
- 18repp50
| Yr | Team | G | Tkl | Sk | Int | PD | FF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | LSU | 12 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | LSU | 13 | 40 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | LSU | 15 | 85 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| Career | — | 40 | 131 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
LSU athletics for 2017 and 2018, and the published 2019 line of 85 tackles, 12.0 tackles for loss, 3.0 sacks, one interception, one fumble recovery and two passes defensed across LSU's 15-game national championship season. Tackles sum exactly to the 131 career total; one source lists 17.5 career tackles for loss against the 17.0 that the seasons add to, a half-unit difference noted rather than resolved. Categories LSU did not publish by season are left blank rather than filled with zeros.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Undersized speed linebacker who covers, tackles in volume and makes a Pro Bowl without dominating physically.
The ceiling: a coverage-first linebacker who becomes the defense's identity and a perennial All-Pro.
The downside if the play strength never improves: a fast linebacker who is schemed at in the run game and eventually replaced.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Queen started from day one and has not stopped. He put up 106 combined tackles as a rookie in Baltimore, then 98, 117 and a career-best 133 in 2023, the year he made the Pro Bowl and helped lead the league's top-ranked scoring defense. The Ravens let him walk and Pittsburgh signed him in March 2024, where he has delivered 129 combined tackles in 2024 and 120 in 2025 as the defense's signal caller. Through Week 2 of 2026 he has started all 103 games he has played, with 713 combined tackles, 15.5 sacks, 27 passes defensed, five interceptions, eight forced fumbles and eight fumble recoveries, plus seven postseason appearances. Pittsburgh notes he is the only player in the league since 2020 to reach that particular combination of tackles, tackles for loss, sacks, takeaways and passes defensed.
The verdict is a clean hit that arrived without a superstar season. He never became the best linebacker in football, and the play-strength issues in the pre-draft file still surface against gap-scheme running teams. But the coverage ability that separated him at LSU translated exactly as projected, the one-year-starter concern proved irrelevant, and he has been a three-down starter and a defensive communicator from his first professional snap through his seventh season. For pick 28 in a class where several linebackers went earlier, that is the best return of the group.
Data note: Imported from Wikipedia 2020 NFL draft player selections table.