Eyioma
Uwazurike.
Eyioma
Uwazurike.
Iowa St.· 6'6"· 316 lb
"Six seasons of Iowa State tape built a long, positionally flexible odd-front lineman whose power rush finally caught up to his run defense the year the draft was watching."Pre-draft read
Uwazurike was a five-technique in Iowa State's three-man front who kicked inside on passing downs. The defining trait was mass with length: he two-gapped on early downs, stacked and shed blockers with his hands and rarely got moved off his spot in the run game.
The second trait was a long-arm bull rush that turned into real production as a senior. He was not a bender or a corner-winner, so his pass rush lived on power, hand placement and the occasional inside counter once a tackle overset. He also used that frame on field goal units, blocking two kicks in his career. The signature was scheme flexibility: a body big enough to play nose and long enough to play the edge in odd fronts.
Odd-front defense that two-gaps on early downs and reduces its ends inside on passing downs.
Year 1: rotational base-down end in a three-man front. Ceiling: full-time starting defensive lineman who plays fifty percent of the snaps.
A four-man front built on one-gap penetration that asks its interior linemen to shoot a gap and win with quickness off the snap.
Eyioma Uwazurike highlights
Iowa State tape showing the long-arm power rush and his work holding the point in an odd front.
2022 NFL Draft prospect: Eyioma Uwazurike
Pre-draft feature on his six-year Cyclone career and first-team All-Big 12 senior season.
Film study: Broncos defensive tackle Eyioma Uwazurike
Breakdown of how Denver has used his length and power on the interior.
Uwazurike arrived at the draft as a sixth-year Cyclone with one of the deepest resumes in the class, a redshirt plus five seasons and sixty games played, the second-most in Iowa State history. The football identity was a big, long, positionally flexible defensive lineman for an odd front, a run defender first who had finally found a pass rush.
The production curve went the right way. He was a reserve as a redshirt freshman, a starter by 2018, an honorable-mention all-conference player in 2019 and 2020, then broke out as a first-team All-Big 12 senior with 42 tackles, 12 tackles for loss and nine sacks, a total that ranked fourth in the conference. The signature game was a career-high two and a half sacks against Texas. The flags were age and athletic ceiling: he turned twenty-four during the pre-draft process and his rush was a power-only proposition against NFL tackles.
Boards slotted him as a Day 3 rotational lineman with scheme-specific value and a floor built on the run game. Denver, converting to a defense that wanted length up front, took him at 116 as the kind of body who could play three spots in an odd front.
- 01
Length in the run game
He stacked blockers with long arms, held the point on early downs and kept his linebackers clean, which is the base-down job.
- 02
Positional flexibility
Iowa State played him at nose, three-technique and five-technique, so any odd-front defense could move him without changing the call.
- 03
Long-arm power
His rush was built on a bull that collapsed the pocket rather than on speed, and it produced nine sacks in his final season.
- 04
Production curve
He improved every year from redshirt reserve to first-team all-conference, an unusual six-season arc of steady internal development.
- 05
Special teams value
Two blocked field goals in his career came directly from the frame and timing that made him useful on the interior.
- 01
Limited bend
He could not flatten around an edge or win with a corner, so any rush that started outside the tackle's frame stalled out.
- 02
Age profile
He was a sixth-year senior entering the league in his mid-twenties, which shortened the developmental runway a Day 3 pick usually gets.
- 03
Pad level inconsistency
At six-foot-six he sometimes came off the ball high, letting shorter interior blockers get underneath his chest plate.
- 04
Scheme dependence
His value was tied to odd fronts and two-gap responsibilities, narrowing the number of teams that had a real role for him.
— — — positional median (p50)
- 40 yd
- —s
- Vertical
- 33inp50
- Broad jump
- 107inp50
- Three-cone
- —s
- Shuttle
- —s
- Bench
- —rep
| Yr | Team | G | Tkl | Sk | Int | PD | FF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Iowa St. | 13 | 16 | 0.5 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | Iowa St. | 9 | 27 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | Iowa St. | 13 | 32 | 1.5 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | Iowa St. | 12 | 27 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | Iowa St. | 13 | 42 | 9 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Career | — | 60 | 144 | 15 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
2020 and 2021 verified line by line on cfbstats (Iowa State team 311, player 1083826); 2017, 2018 and 2019 come from the official Iowa State and Denver Broncos bios because cfbstats does not publish those years for this player. Games (60), tackles (144), sacks (15.0), passes defensed (3) and fumble recoveries (2) sum exactly to the official career totals. Tackles for loss are the one exception: the school credits 34.5 for his career but does not publish a 2018 figure, so that season is left unverified rather than back-filled, and the listed seasons add to 29.5. He also redshirted in 2016, a season with no snaps and therefore no line. Interceptions and forced fumbles are not published and are left unverified rather than counted as zero.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Rotational odd-front lineman who plays a real snap count without ever becoming a full-time name.
Big interior lineman whose power rush and run-game reliability keep him starting for a decade.
Camp-body interior lineman whose size earns looks but never converts into regular defensive snaps.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
He spent most of his rookie year on the practice squad before playing eight games down the stretch of 2022, posting 15 tackles and a pass defensed. Then everything stopped: the league suspended him indefinitely in July 2023 for betting on NFL games, including Denver games, and he sat out the entire season with no contact permitted with the team. Reinstated in 2024, he returned rusty and played only four games with 11 tackles and half a sack. The real comeback was 2025, when he dressed for all 17 games with one start and set career highs across the board at 38 combined tackles and 3.5 sacks. He entered 2026 as the leading candidate to replace a departed starter in Denver's front.
In hindsight the football evaluation was accurate and almost beside the point. The traits that got him drafted, length, run-game anchor and odd-front flexibility, are exactly what has kept him employed for five years. What nobody had on the card was a lost season to a gambling suspension at the precise moment a Day 3 lineman needs year-two snaps. That he rebuilt himself into a starting candidate afterwards is the story of this pick.