'Disruption Is Production' - NBC Sports' Chris Simms Loves Bengals Selection of Shemar Stewart

 NBC Sports NFL analyst Chris Simms is a big fan of Shemar Stewart. The former NFL quarterback had the former Texas A&M star as his second-best edge rusher in the 2025 NFL Draft and "second-biggest freak."

He is now a Cincinnati Bengal after the team selected him on Thursday night. Stewart has just 4.5 career sacks, but Simms described earlier this month how he was more disruptive than those numbers suggest.

"Disruption is production," Simms said. "There's too many plays where this guy makes freaky plays, ruins it, and somebody else gets the tackle or the sack. It doesn't matter. And I'm gonna hit on this before I even hit on some of the the talk of the player, right? Because the player is special. But other guys in this draft are being talked about as maybe a better pass rusher or whatever, and we'll get into that a little bit, but they have five or six sacks, okay? And I'm gonna just use one for transparency. Like Jalen Walker from Georgia, he's got six sacks or six and a half sacks on the year. I mean a lot of his sacks are like hustle sacks quarterback holding the ball."

The deeper numbers echo some of what Simms is saying. Sure, Stewart had just 4.5 sacks at A&M, but he did notch 75 pressures across three seasons (39 in 2024), according to Pro Football Focus. that 2024 mark ranked 29th among 47 qualified edge rushers.

The havoc is there, Stewart has just for one reason or another not finished those pressure plays into sacks at a consistent rate. Now, Al Golden and Jerry Montgomery are tasked with pushing the right buttons to help Stewart hit that high-sack ceiling.