Gregory
Junior.
Gregory
Junior.
Ouachita Baptist
Junior is a shade under six feet and 202 pounds with a 6-foot-4 wingspan, and he tested like a first-rounder at his pro day: 4.46 in the forty, a 4.17 short shuttle, a 6.97 three-cone and a 39.5-inch vertical. Those agility numbers are why NFL teams flew to Arkadelphia to watch a Division II corner work out.
On tape he is a pattern-matching zone defender who drives on throws in front of him and finishes tackles, which fits the nickel role teams projected him into. The concerns are the small-school ones: his 1.63 ten-yard split is slow for the position, he grabs at the top of routes because Great American Conference receivers never punished him for it, and he had never faced a Power Five release before rookie minicamp.
A zone-heavy Cover-3 or quarters defense that lets him read the quarterback rather than travel with a receiver in man coverage.
Year 1: special-teams contributor and developmental nickel. Ceiling: fourth corner who plays 300 zone snaps a season.
A press-man defense that asks him to mirror an NFL release off the line with no help behind him.
The testing said slot corner; the tape needed two years of development it never got.
Gregory Junior, CB, Ouachita Baptist | 2022 NFL Draft Prospect Interview
His pre-draft interview as the first NFL prospect in Ouachita Baptist history.
Junior is from Crossett, Arkansas, played at Crossett High School and signed with Ouachita Baptist, a Division II school in Arkadelphia that had never produced an NFL draft pick in its history.
He played ten games as a freshman in 2017 with fourteen tackles and three pass breakups, then started all thirteen games in 2018 with 42 tackles, 26 of them solo, and an interception against Arkansas-Monticello. A shortened 2019 gave him nine games and 26 tackles. Then the Great American Conference cancelled its fall 2020 season, and he lost a year of tape at exactly the point in his development when scouts needed to see it.
The 2021 season made up for it. Junior posted 46 tackles, three tackles for loss and seven pass breakups and made first-team All-GAC. His pro day did the rest: the shuttle and three-cone times were among the best of any cornerback in the class at any level. Jacksonville took him 197th overall, and he became the first player in Ouachita Baptist history to be drafted into the NFL.
- 01
Elite change of direction
a 4.17 short shuttle and 6.97 three-cone are top-of-the-class numbers for a cornerback at any level.
- 02
Explosiveness
a 39.5-inch vertical and 10-foot-3 broad jump give him the burst to close on throws in front of him.
- 03
Length for the slot
a 6-foot-4 1/4 wingspan on a 202-pound frame lets him contest catch points bigger nickels usually cannot.
- 04
Willing tackler
128 career tackles from the corner position, including 26 solo stops in his 2018 sophomore season.
- 05
Zone processing
he reads the quarterback's eyes and drives, the trait his coaches said translated fastest to the NFL level.
- 01
Competition level
four years against Great American Conference receivers with no FBS tape at all to calibrate the projection.
- 02
Short-area burst off the line
a 1.63 ten-yard split is slow for a cornerback and shows up against sudden releases.
- 03
Grabby technique
he plays through receivers at the top of routes in a way Division II officials allowed and NFL officials will not.
- 04
Lost development year
the cancelled 2020 season left him with three real seasons of film before his draft year.
| Yr | Team | G | Tkl | Sk | Int | PD | FF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Ouachita Baptist | 10 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
| 2018 | Ouachita Baptist | 13 | 42 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | Ouachita Baptist | 9 | 26 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | Ouachita Baptist | — | 46 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0 |
| Career | — | 32 | 128 | 0 | 1 | 11 | 0 |
Ouachita Baptist is a Division II program and its athletics site publishes no statistical tables for him, so the 2017, 2018 and 2019 lines come from the narrative season summaries in his official Ouachita Baptist biography and the 2021 line from contemporaneous draft reporting. The four seasons add to 128 tackles. There is no 2020 row because the Great American Conference cancelled its fall 2020 football season. Game totals for 2021 and the career line are left empty rather than estimated, and every category the bio does not state explicitly is empty rather than zero.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Late-round developmental corner who bounces across practice squads without securing a job.
Small-school athlete whose testing profile translates into a genuine multi-year NFL role.
Long, athletic corner who never converts the traits into consistent NFL defensive snaps.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Jacksonville waived him at the end of his rookie camp, kept him on the practice squad, and promoted him to the active roster on December 19, 2022. He got on the field, but a hamstring injury in Week 1 of 2023 sent him to injured reserve until November, and the Jaguars waived him with an injury designation in August 2024 with seventeen career tackles and a single pass breakup to his name.
What followed is the modern journeyman circuit: Indianapolis practice squad in September 2024, released three weeks later; Houston practice squad in October, a reserve/future deal in January 2025, waived in May; Green Bay in May, released in August; Denver on August 10, waived five days later with an injury designation. He signed with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the CFL in January 2026 and was released that July. The Division II gamble did not miss because of effort or testing — it missed because the transition curve he needed to climb kept getting interrupted by injuries.