NFL Draft
3/28/25
5 min read
Alijah Huzzie 2025 NFL Draft: Scouting Report For North Carolina Tar Heels CB
Height: 5092 (verified)
Weight: 194lbs (verified)
Year: Sixth-Year Senior
Pro Comparison: Darnay Holmes
Scouting Overview
North Carolina Tar Heels cornerback Alijah Huzzie projects as a developmental nickel cornerback in the NFL. Huzzie is aggressive, physical with his hands, sticky in man coverage, and has flashes of good eyes and ball skills when playing in zone.
His functional speed and stature appear to be limiting factors that will restrict his success opportunities on the outside, but his play demeanor and density should afford him a chance to pop in the slot, where he played most of his snaps in 2023. Huzzie comes with a medical flag after tearing his ACL at the 2025 East-West Shrine Bowl.
2025 NFL Combine Results
TBD
Positives
- Scrappy and physical man coverage reps that work to disrupt release and break timing
- Zone coverage ball skills yielded big ball production going back to his time at East Tennessee State
- Willing run support and striking tackler can project inside
Negatives
- Is an older prospect coming off of six years of college ball
- Unclear outlook for 2025 season after suffering ACL tear in late January
- Can be overly grabby and vulnerable to penalty calls (13 total called the last 3 seasons)
Background
Huzzie is from LaGrange, GA, and played high school football for Heard County HS. There, he was an all-state athlete in football and basketball. Huzzie went unranked through the recruiting process before enrolling at East Tennessee State in 2019. He played in four games as a true freshman before redshirting and then played his redshirt freshman season with the program in the spring of 2021 on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Huzzie would play with the school through the end of the 2022 season. That season, he claimed FCS All-America and First Team SoCon honors, bringing his ETSU career to 34 games and 30 starts. He also finished 12th in the voting for the Buck Buchanan Award for the best player in FCS that season, defending 22 passes.
Huzzie entered the transfer portal after the 2022 season. As a 4-star transfer (247 Sports), he landed at Chapel Hill with the Tar Heels. He started 11 games for UNC in 2023 before suffering a season-ending injury against Clemson. He returned for his sixth and final season of eligibility to play in 13 games before accepting an invitation to the 2025 East-West Shrine Bowl.
Huzzie tore his ACL at the event, which forced him to sit out the rest of the pre-draft process.
Tale Of The Tape
Huzzie is fun to watch on tape. He’s a scrappy player unfazed by bigger assignments and showcases the hand power as a bothersome draw who is stingy with his space. He’s guilty of being overly grabby when pressing or as a receiver tries to break across his face, which underscores some of his warts and limitations as a player. Reflexive quickness is not a big-time area of strength, and I’m certain he has the short-area agility to mirror top route runners off the body.
As a coverage player, Huzzie has shown steady and incremental growth since 2021, however. He’s played a lot of football in his time and was a feast-or-famine player during his final two years at East Tennessee State, conceding major RAC yardage and completions before spending a year in the nickel and a year outside at North Carolina. The arrow, when you’re willing to overlook the age element and now an injury concern, is pointing in the right direction for a player who can still find more efficiency in how he plays.
He’s a smooth athlete, even if he isn’t a super explosive one. He’s shown the ability to put his eyes in the right place, both as a coverage player processing routes and the quarterback or playing through a receiver’s frame to key run reads early in the rep before falling off to fit a game.
Huzzie is a sufficient tackler, but you do wish he had more length to be a wrap-up defender. His sub-30-inch arms show up, and he’s typically more of a striker than a tackler as a result. These limitations are what they are, but his toughness and aggression can allow him to mitigate them by fitting tackle challenges with confidence.
Teams may not have the evidence they need, on tape or with testing, to trust his speed on the outside. With a shorter stature and a lack of length, he’s already missing key elements to steepen ball trajectories when he’s targeted on the outside.
However, with only sufficient open-field speed, he could be set up for failure by playing his same aggressive press style on the outside or charging him with playing in space overtop of routes and expecting him to collide and disrupt through the frame of receivers.
There are special team contributions worth nothing that should help Huzzie’s case. He’s returned 36 punts in his college career (with nearly 90 additional fair catches). He returned one for a score in each of his two seasons at North Carolina — this added layer boosts his 53-man outlook.
Ideal Scheme Fit, Role
Huzzie projects best as a nickel defender in a man-heavy scheme. He’ll be best served to stay physical and to learn to properly walk the line of using his hands to disrupt routes vs. trying to find extra pop to play isolated in space as he would need in playing country zone coverages.
Grade: 69.00/100.00, Sixth Round Value
Big Board Rank: 228
Position Rank: CB26
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