Before he could legally buy a beer, Colin Simmons led the entire SEC in sacks. Texas's quarterback gets the headlines; its sophomore edge rusher might be the best player on the roster.
Simmons arrived as the nation's top edge recruit and hit immediately: Shaun Alexander Freshman of the Year in 2024 with nine sacks, then a sophomore leap that led the SEC outright — 12 sacks, 15.5 tackles for loss, and a sack in each of his last five regular-season games. He's a consensus All-American and, by the way, still a teenager.
On a Texas team built around Arch Manning's Heisman push, Simmons is the quiet half of the title case — the disruptor who makes a championship defense go, maturing now into a vocal leader as well as a sack artist.
The forward stakes are simple and large: a third dominant season cements him as the best edge rusher in college football and a likely top draft pick, and gives Texas the pass rush a national title usually requires. The only question is whether the league has figured out how to block him — because through two years, it hasn't.
How he plays
Simmons wins with the first step. He's a speed-to-power edge whose get-off forces tackles to open their hips early — and once they do, he's bending the corner or converting the rush back into their chest. The production isn't a hot streak: a sack in each of his last five regular-season games, three in one night against Kentucky, and an SEC-leading 12 for the year as a sophomore. What he's added is the part that scares coordinators most — he's pairing the burst with a plan, stringing pass-rush moves instead of running the same arc. The one thing left to round out is the run-game grind on early downs. But as a pure pass rusher, two years in, the SEC still hasn't found an answer — and that's the rare kind of problem a national-title defense is built on.
