Pittsburgh DL Calijah Kancey adds to Aaron Donald comparisons

If you are drawing any sort of comparisons to the great Aaron Donald, you’re doing something right. Pittsburgh’s Calijah Kancey, a 2023 NFL Draft hopeful, has plenty in common with arguably the best defensive tackle to ever do it.

As a matter of fact, they have borderline eery similarities, outside of just the fact that they both played college ball for the Pitt Panthers.

Kancey had a couple of really productive seasons to end his career at Pitt. He racked up 14.5 sacks and 27.5 tackles for loss over the last two seasons. His production at Pitt, in terms of those two metrics, wasn’t quite as ridiculous as what we saw once upon a time from Aaron Donald. Donald had 28.5 tackles for loss, 11 sacks, and four forced fumbles in his final season alone.

With that being said, what is the most important quality of an interior defensive lineman in today’s NFL? You could at least argue that no metric matters more to NFL teams than get-off. How quickly can you get off the ball when it’s snapped and make life hard for the quarterback?

Not only did Calijah Kancey come out and run a blazing 4.67 in the 40-yard dash — the fastest for a defensive lineman since 2003 — but he ran a 1.64 in the 10-yard split.

We need to just clear something up really quick — Calijah Kancey is not Aaron Donald. But that doesn’t mean that he can’t end up being a disruptive force with these kinds of numbers. The physical similarities are striking in terms of height, weight, speed, etc. Some of the most explosive defensive linemen in the game today didn’t have a 1.64 in the 10-yard split, which is where they make their money.

Chris Jones of the Kansas City Chiefs had a 1.69 10-yard split. Javon Hargrave once had a 1.69. Donald himself had a 1.63. Kancey is in elite company no matter which way you look at it, and that’s undoubtedly going to really upgrade his stock as we get closer to the 2023 NFL Draft.