Late-Blooming Lorenzo Alexander: From Glue Guy to NFL Sack Leader

Lorenzo Alexander leads the NFL with nine sacks, despite the fact that the 10th-year Buffalo Bills pass-rusher had just nine total sacks during his first nine NFL seasons. 

The 33-year-old is one of just two players in football with more than three sacks and 20-plus tackles (along with the legendary Von Miller), despite the fact he started just 16 games while being employed by five different teams during the first nine years of his career. 

The 245-pound linebacker is one of only six players in football with at least three forced fumbles and has been graded by Pro Football Focus as the seventh-best 3-4 outside linebacker in the league, despite the fact he entered the NFL as a 315-pound, undrafted defensive tackle in 2005 and didn’t play a regular-season snap for another two years.

For more than a decade, Lorenzo Alexander was unfamiliar to fantasy football owners and anonymous to the vast majority of casual football fans.  

And then, suddenly, everything changed. 

The physical evolution of Lorenzo Alexander

Perform a Google search for Lorenzo Alexander in his draft year of 2005, and you get nothing but a mid-January positional draft rankings post on an obscure, long-defunct draft blog. There, the Cal product is listed as the 10th-best defensive tackle in his class. 

Three months later, 16 defensive tackles were drafted. Alexander was not one of them. He spent the next two years on practice squads in Arizona, Carolina and Washington before earning a shot on special teams and as a reserve defensive tackle with the Redskins in 2007. 

But in order to survive in the NFL, Alexander had to establish himself as a jack-of-all-trades. The Redskins used him as a tight end, a fullback and even a guard. They began calling him the “one-man gang.” In ’07, he played more regular-season snaps on offense than on defense. And in ’08, be began to realize that in order to make himself available at more positions in the front seven, he’d have to cut down from 300-plus pounds.

“It was really out of necessity,” Alexander told Bleacher Report. “I was undrafted and painted as a backup, a special teams guy. So coaches each year would either try to move my position or change me just to help the team. I was willing to do that, but in order to play certain roles I had to lose weight.” 

That transition from 315 pounds to 245 took about four years. Along the way, Alexander became a stud special teamer and a quality backup defender in Washington, culminating in a Pro Bowl nod as the NFC’s special teams selection in 2012. And that willingness to change could be a big reason why he’s lasted this long and is, in fact, peaking at the ripe age of 33. 

“Being lighter now, my knees don’t hurt,” he said. “I have more energy, I’m healthier. I can feel a huge difference now that I’ve lost all that weight.”

Here he is now, well on his way to an All-Pro-caliber season as a remarkably productive sack artist, despite the fact he says he isn’t a natural pass-rusher. 

This all could have—and probably should have—happened three years ago, when Alexander leveraged that special teams Pro Bowl nod into a three-year, $9.5 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals. He was a Week 1 starter for Arizona in 2013 and tied a career high with five quarterback pressures while also registering four tackles that week against the St. Louis Rams, but his inaugural year with the Cardinals was spoiled by a season-ending Lisfranc injury in Week 3. 

He never started another game for the Cards and was released after playing special teams throughout the 2014 season. It was the same deal in 2015 when he signed a one-year deal with the Oakland Raiders, where he played just 44 defensive snaps and recorded just five tackles. 

And then, suddenly, everything changed. 

The mental and spiritual evolution of Lorenzo Alexander

Alexander’s life changed the day teammate Sean Taylor’s ended. He and Taylor were both 24 years old when intruders shot the superstar Redskins safety in his …

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