If he is anywhere near the 6'3", 275 lbs listed size, we have a hell of a DT on our hands. He is powerful, fast, quick, and relentless, at least on his senior season highlight video. He looked very good on his junior season video too. NYC high school football doesn't get much respect, so I think he gets a crappy assessment. Check him out on kickoff coverage!
Tyriq Blanding has been flying under the radar and is terribly underrated, IMO.
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Impressive film. Covers an awful lot of the field for a big guy. Even lined up as linebacker and went sideline to sideline. He also doesn’t stop, plays to the whistle.
Good catch. Thanks.
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Yes, if size is legit, have to like the way this big man moves. I'm on board with the under-rated tag.
Same high school that Maurice Evans attended.
Maurice had almost immediate impact for the Lions. If Tyriq can put up a season like Maurice's sophomore year, we'll have an all Big Dlineman.
Many NYC/NE City players probably lose a full star just because they aren’t comprehensively evaluated. Plop the kid in Central Texas where the coverage of HS football is year around and he attends 7 v 7 camps, etc regularly, and his profile blows up. We’ve had great results from 3-4 star kids from the NE corridor
yep.. we need "bigs" on the defensive side of the ball. Rivals has him at 280. He sure could make the rotation....is he on campus?
Kind of wish we had a better tie in to the Samoan/Tongan communities - the Pacific Island gene pool cranks out big, physical specimens
Great film, thanks for sharing. He's a man among boys. I think you can see the explosiveness. You can't tell much about strength though because that is obviously not very high quality football.
In the old days 10 years ago you'd expect a kid like this to train for a couple of years then contribute in his redshirt soph year, but these days, he could end up in the extended rotation as a freshman.
Still kills me that guy left for the NFL early. Went undrafted, bounced around camps and never made a roster, He was just getting to be a dominant college DL and had high draft pick potential if he'd stayed.
He didn't test well and his third (and last season) at PSU didn't go well. If he had a senior season similar to hs sophomore year, he might have been drafted, but based on those testing numbers, it would have been third day.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted somewhere that we could really use a Samoan American coach who can recruit. Totally agree with you!
Many of them seem to migrate to CA and a ton of them to Utah. You are correct, they seem to dominate the middle of the DL. We had that one DE from Pago Pago about 20 years ago. Don't know how we recruited him, but he didn't stay very long. Transferred to Hawaii I believe.
Utah and the far West, where there are more Mormons than on the East coast. Add that to the fact that there just aren't many Samoans living in our neck of the woods makes it tough to recruit them. That is why we really need a Samoan coach/father figure on staff.
