Cameron
Young.
Cameron
Young.
Mississippi St.· 6'3"· 304 lb· 5.10s 40
"A true zero-technique who wins by refusing to move: the anchor is real, the pass rush never arrived, and the whole projection rests on whether a two-down nose can stay healthy enough to matter."Pre-draft read
Young is a true nose tackle whose game lived over the center and in the A-gaps. He works from a wide base and heavy hands, thumping into a chest plate and squaring up rather than slipping past it. He is a read-and-react player: take the blow, find the ball, work off the block. Pad level is genuinely low for the body type, and that leverage lets him wear a double team without surrendering ground.
The second trait is short-area jolt — he can stun a lone center with a two-hand strike and walk him backward on early downs. Rush is the flat part of the profile; two career sacks in five seasons tells the truth. The signature is repeatability: his gap looks the same on rep 45 as on rep 5.
Base-heavy even front (4-3 under or a 3-4 with a true zero) that wants a dedicated run-down plugger and is willing to substitute him off on passing downs.
Year 1: base-down nose taking 15-20 snaps a game and core special teams. Ceiling: the run-defense identity piece on a top-10 rushing defense, 350-450 snaps a year, never on the field on third-and-7.
A nickel-first, one-gap penetrating front that asks its interior to win as a pass rusher — he has no counter after the initial push, so those defenses would rather use a lighter 3-tech and take his snaps away entirely.
His value is entirely leverage against the run; the more early-down base personnel a defense plays, the more he is worth.
Cameron Young | #93 | Mississippi State Bulldogs DT
Full college highlight reel showing the A-gap anchor work and two-hand thump against SEC centers.
GAME PLAN WRECKER - Mississippi State DL Cameron Young
Film breakdown of how his double-team absorption freed State's linebackers on early downs.
New Seattle Seahawks DL Cameron Young Highlights, Mississippi State, Senior Bowl
Senior Bowl and Mississippi State cutups from the pre-draft process.
A five-year Bulldog and a pure zero-technique, Young is one of the few players in this class whose job description fits on one line: occupy the center, eat the double team, keep the linebackers clean. He is built for it — thick through the hips and trunk, low-slung, with contact balance that does not get knocked off track by a guard climbing off a combo.
The production reads exactly like the role. Across 2019-22 he logged 107 tackles, nine tackles for loss and two sacks, with his one full-time season in 2022 producing 36 tackles and three stops behind the line while starting all thirteen games. Nobody drafted him for the box score. The signature reps are the ones where State's ends and linebackers ran free because he had a center on skates. The flags were just as clear: no pass-rush plan beyond the initial push, a slow shed against blockers who latch, and a snap-count ceiling that keeps him off the field on third down.
The board treated him as a mid-Day 3 body with a specific, shrinking job. Seattle took him at 123 because their front had no true nose behind the veterans and wanted a base-down anchor on a rookie deal. It was a role pick, evaluated as a role pick — the risk was never that he would fail at the job, it was that the job would not be worth 400 snaps a year.
- 01
Anchor at the point
He absorbs single blocks and combos without giving ground, the rare interior body who can hold two gaps and still keep his feet under him.
- 02
Natural leverage
Plays low without ducking his head; his pad level lets a 304-pound frame create the collision most bigger men can only take.
- 03
Hand strength
Two-hand thump into the sternum lands with real pop, jolting centers backward and stalling combo blocks before the guard can climb.
- 04
Motor for the body type
Keeps pushing rep after rep in the fourth quarter, which is why State trusted him with the base-down grunt work for two full seasons.
- 05
Athletic testing base
Elite composite testing for a 6-3, 304-pound nose suggests more short-area explosion available than the college tape ever asked him to show.
- 01
No pass-rush plan
Two sacks in five seasons; once the initial bull stalls, there is no swipe, club or cross-chop to fall back on.
- 02
Late shed
He absorbs the block well but disengages a beat slow, which turns wins at the line into tackles four yards downfield instead of in the hole.
- 03
Range off his gap
Lateral pursuit is limited; anything outside the guard-to-guard box is somebody else's tackle and he knows it.
- 04
Snap-count ceiling
A base-down-only body in a league that plays nickel most of the time, which caps his value even when the anchor work is good.
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
- 5.10sp50
- Vertical
- —in
- Broad jump
- —in
- Three-cone
- —s
- Shuttle
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- Bench
- —rep
| Yr | Team | G | Tkl | Sk | Int | PD | FF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Mississippi State | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | Mississippi State | 6 | 15 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | Mississippi State | 11 | 53 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 2022 | Mississippi State | 13 | 36 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Career | — | 42 | 109 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 0 |
Season lines verified against CollegeFootballData for 2019-2022; the four seasons sum exactly to 109 tackles, 9.0 TFL, 2.0 sacks and 4 pass breakups, and the TFL, sack and PBU totals match Mississippi State's own draft release verbatim. MSU lists 107 career tackles (42 games, 25 starts, five seasons, one interception) because its count excludes bowl work; the two-tackle gap is a source difference, not an estimate. His 2018 reserve season produced no recorded defensive statistics and is not itemized rather than zero-filled.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
A rotational base-down nose who plays 200-300 snaps a year and lives on the roster bubble.
The optimistic outcome: a mid-round nose who turns pure anchor into a decade of starting run-down snaps.
The floor: a big-bodied plugger who cycles through camps without ever locking down a role.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Seattle used him the way the evaluation said they would. As a rookie in 2023 he played sixteen of seventeen games, took 205 defensive snaps and 86 on special teams, and finished with 18 tackles, a quarterback hit and a pass defensed — the exact base-down rotation slot he was drafted for, with one start. Then the body gave out. He opened 2024 on the PUP list with a knee issue, was activated in October, played one game for two defensive snaps and went back on injured reserve in November. Seattle waived him in April 2025, the first member of that draft class to go. Green Bay signed him that June and released him a month later, before training camp opened, and he has not appeared on an active roster since.
The scouting call was right and the outcome still went sideways, which happens more often than the industry admits. He was never going to be a rusher and nobody pretended otherwise; the bet was that a run-down anchor could earn 300-400 snaps a year for a decade on cheap contracts. The knee ended that math before it could compound, and the modern nickel-first league offered no soft landing for a two-down nose with no third-down trait. In hindsight the fourth round was one round rich for a player this narrow with no injury cushion — a fifth or sixth would have made the same bet at a price that survived a lost season.