Jon Gruden put a number on Rueben Bain Jr. before the rookie has played a padded NFL practice. “I think he can be a double-digit sack guy,” the former Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach said on 95.7 WDAE last week, in an appearance the team’s website highlighted Wednesday. Gruden went further than the sack call: “If you look at James Harrison, who played a long time for the Pittsburgh Steelers, very similar length and playing style. That is what I think Tampa Bay has, their version of a young James Harrison.”
That is a heavy comparison to hang on a first-year player. Harrison went undrafted, was twice a first-team All-Pro, set Pittsburgh’s single-season record with 16 sacks in 2008 and became the first undrafted player to win Defensive Player of the Year. Gruden noted he isn’t alone in seeing the resemblance — he said Larry Foote, Harrison’s longtime Steelers teammate and now an assistant on Todd Bowles’ staff, has invoked Harrison’s name around the building as well.
The mechanics of the comp are at least sound. Bain, the No. 15 overall pick out of Miami, comes in without prototype edge length and wins anyway — with power, hand violence and a motor that made him the tone-setter on the Hurricanes’ defensive front. Harrison built a Hall of Fame case out of the same unfashionable toolbox. Bowles plans to deploy Bain at outside linebacker, where his ability to convert speed to power should play on early downs as well as obvious passing situations.
The sober projections sit well below Gruden’s ceiling. ESPN’s statistical model pegs Bain at 5.6 sacks this season, and DraftKings posted his rookie total at 6.0. History is the bigger obstacle: only two rookies in the last five years have reached double digits — Micah Parsons with 13.0 in 2021 and James Pearce Jr. with 10.5 last season. Rookie pass rushers who hit ten are outliers by definition, whatever their college tape looked like.
Gruden won this franchise’s first Super Bowl and doesn’t work for it now, so the number reads as a scouting opinion rather than a sales pitch. Camp opens at the end of the month, and Bain’s rep count alongside Yaya Diaby in Bowles’ pressure packages will say more than any radio hit. Six sacks would make him a good rookie. Ten would make Gruden the one evaluator who read the tape right.
