The 2025 NFL Draft will feature the most athletic strong safety in NFL combine history: South Carolina’s Nick Emmanwori. In fact, he’s one of the most athletic prospects of all-time in the officially recorded combine era, which began in 1999. 

At 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, Emmanwori went bonkers on the field inside Lucas Oil Stadium on Friday night, running 4.38 seconds in the 40-yard dash with a 1.49-zecond 10-yard split. He had a 43-inch vertical and an 11-foot-6 broad jump. Both of those jumps place him in the 98th percentile at the safety position. 

It’s what the South Carolina product accomplished altogether that makes him, technically, the most athletic safety we’ve seen at the combine.

Emmanwori received a perfect 10.0 Relative Athletic Score at the strong safety position. (RAS is an algorithm created by Kent Lee Plante that factors in height and weight along with a prospect’s workout figures to assigns a 1-10 score to each prospect in every class.)

Plante added more context to Emmanwori’s rare 10.0 in a separate tweet, writing the following:

Even at linebacker, which is where Emmanwori will presumably be deployed at times in the NFL, he’s an elite-caliber athlete. The same goes when he aligns on a opposite end of the modern-day safety spectrum, at free safety. 

And what’s most compelling about this historic workout — it matches what Emmanwori demonstrates on film. He’s far from a prospect who simply hacked the system by finding the right trainer to prepare for the specific events in Indianapolis. 

He had 85 tackles as a freshman in 2022. The next year, his tackle total dipped to 71 yet he defended eight passes and snagged two picks. As a senior, he had 88 takedowns, three tackles for loss, and four interceptions, two of which he returned for touchdowns. 

Emmanwori entered the combine as the No. 26 prospect (No. 2 safety) in our CBS Sports rankings. As for where he’ll go in the draft, our analysts have him going 18th to the Seattle Seahawks and 30th to the Buffalo Bills in their latest mock drafts.