Does Tre Herndon have what it takes to be a starting cornerback in the NFL?

This week, we’re sitting down with Andrew Potter from Football Outsiders to talk about the Jacksonville Jaguars and how they think they’ll do this season. How can they improve their win-loss record? Will their run defense get gashed up and down the field? What is Jay Gruden’s impact on Gardner Minshew and the offense in general.

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Do you think Tre Herndon has what it takes to be a starting outside cornerback in the NFL?

He certainly has the athleticism and physical profile, and his second season was encouraging. He’s definitely not Jalen Ramsey, who he replaced in the lineup, but he shouldn’t have to be — that burden lands on the shoulders of CJ Henderson.

Herndon’s biggest weakness was tackling, where he had the fourth-worst rate of broken tackles among defensive backs with at least 30 solo tackles. He was roughly a league-average to slightly below-average starter in most of our other charting stats. If he can continue to develop and progress, he has the potential to lock down an A.J. Bouye-type role opposite Henderson. That’s very, very valuable in a system like Jacksonville’s.

The caveat here is that cornerback stats are highly variable from year to year, so it’s very difficult for analytics to isolate the performance of an individual cornerback from that of the pass defense as a whole.

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