Texas Football: 3 best Longhorn DB’s that ever played in NFL

The claim that the Texas football program has in its 118-year history to “Defensive Back U” has some backing to it when looking at NFL production.

While putting a new spin on it, how would most people grade out the best defensive backs in the NFL that ever came out of the Texas football program? Given that advanced metrics have come a long way since a lot of the best former Longhorn defensive backs played both in college and the NFL, it is important to understand how they could be viewed under a different microscope.

The Longhorns have claimed before to be the official “DBU” among all of the college football programs that could get that title. That might be a bit far fetched, but they do have quite the laundry list of defensive backs that stood out at both the college and NFL levels in the more than 100-year long history of the program.

This line of talent even goes up to the point of the 2020 NFL Draft, when the first former Longhorn off the board was safety Brandon Jones, picked by the Miami Dolphins in the third round 72nd overall. Even when Texas is down, they tend to send an abundance of undervalued defensive back talent to the NFL. That is put on display just in the Minnesota Vikings defensive backfield alone, with the likes of cornerbacks Kris Boyd and Holton Hill getting picked up no earlier than the seventh round of the draft.

Mind you that this list will take into account former Longhorn defensive backs that still played in an era in the NFL where stats were as tightly accounted for. Advanced metrics might also be limited for those defensive backs, but they’re still considered for this ranking.

Here’s a deeper dive into a reformatted version of the three best former Longhorn defensive backs, in terms of production and efficiency, to ever play in the NFL.