Welcome in to the Draft Lab, a weekly series here on pushing the pile on CBS Sports Network, where we dive into the 2025 NFL draft and go position group by position group inspecting the top guys,

what we look for when scouting the positions and giving some takes on who may be the best

at certain skill sets when projecting to the NFL. I'm Mike Renner, joined today by Chris

Trapasso fellow draft analysts here for CBS.

And as I said, we're doing linebackers today.

We ran through offense.

If you haven't seen those, go check them out on YouTube.

We ran through defensive line last week. And now we turn our attention to the linebacker class.

But before we get to the names who are in my top 10 here, Chris, I just want to hear your thoughts on this linebacker class in general.

How does it compare some past years and is their talent? Is it deep? Is it thin? What do you got?

I don't think it's quite as good as some of the big-time linebacker classes that we've seen in the

past. But as I've gotten through the full evaluation of this draft class, I think there are some quality

players that are going to represent awesome value late day two and into day three. So I think it's a

relatively deep class that at the beginning of this process we thought was not very good at all,

but it's actually a pretty good group. Yeah, I do think that while I have six of these guys in my top 100, my top

six are all in the top 100. And so that's obviously top 100 is kind of your back end of day two,

right? So everyone outside of that is more of a day three guy likely to go day three. But I think

there are intriguing guys on day three. I think there's a lot of athletes, at least in this linebacker class, a lot of guys who, you know, can play a role in an NFL scheme. So let's get to the names. Let's get to the top 10 then. Start off with number one, a guy that, you know, there's not a lot of consensus number one players at certain positions. I have not seen a single person who has a

different linebacker number one in this draft class than Jihad Campbell out of Alabama.

A true do-it-all sort of linebacker who is tailor-made for the modern NFL game that's

using these guys more and more as blitzers.

He's so good in that regard and just so physically gifted.

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