Bradyn Welch-Joiner didn’t exactly dial back the praise when Mandrell Desir came up on Friday.
The transfer center called the Florida State defensive lineman a “first-round draft pick no-brainer,” a line that landed with some serious weight at the start of fall camp. That kind of hype is standard this time of year, when everybody is in the best shape of their life and every room seems to be overflowing with breakout candidates. But Desir is not just any name in that mix.
The sophomore already turned in a productive freshman season, finishing with 6.5 sacks and 24 pressures, both team highs for Florida State. He did it while playing the 12th most snaps on the defense. Even so, the bigger picture is less straightforward than Welch-Joiner’s quote suggests.
Desir’s season was good enough to put him on NFL radars and good enough to make Florida State pay to keep him and his twin brother Darryll after both entered the transfer portal this offseason before returning to Tallahassee. But the tape still shows a player with real holes in his game, not a finished product ready to be stamped as a future first-rounder.
The production was real. So were the warts.
By pass-rush win rate, Desir ranked fourth on the team at 9.3%, and his 25 percent missed-tackle rate was the second-highest on the roster, according to PFF. As an interior rusher in Tony White’s 3-3-5 look, he brings a useful blend of quickness and length at 6-foot-4, 270 pounds. He’s fast off the ball and already has a decent bag of pass-rush moves, with the rip move doing a lot of the heavy lifting when he tries to slip between guard and tackle.
But when that first move doesn’t land, things can go sideways fast. Desir has a habit of ending up on the ground when he loses, and that’s where the concerns start to pile up. His balance needs work, his pad level needs work, and his frame looks close to maxed out, which makes it fair to wonder how much more strength he can add without sacrificing the quickness that makes him dangerous in the first place.
The run game is where the picture gets even messier. Desir can be a nightmare for interior offensive linemen when he’s attacking downhill, but once blockers get hands on him, he can struggle to hold up. He doesn’t anchor well against double teams, and that weakness can pull him into a style that feels like TFL-or-bust, which opens up lanes behind him.
That problem won’t get easier this season. Florida State won’t have 6-foot-5, 337-pound Darrell Jackson Jr. around to absorb blockers, so Desir should see more attention coming his way.
There was one note of caution in all of this, too: the 12 snaps Desir played at nose last season were 12 too many. Even there, the issues didn’t disappear.
Still, the conversation around him isn’t coming out of nowhere. There is a path for Desir to become one of the better defensive linemen in college football if he sharpens the details - a more disciplined pass-rush plan, better leverage, stronger hand usage, and improved ability to convert speed to power. That’s a meaningful jump, and maybe Welch-Joiner is already seeing it every day in camp.
If he is, then Florida State may be staring at a big season from Desir and a defensive line that looks the part. If not, the “first-round draft pick no-brainer” label may have arrived a little too early.
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