From his low, menacing crouch, bent at the waist, coiled for confrontation — the athlete’s universal stance — Sonny Styles, if you tweaked the uniform and the setting, could be just about anything: a wrestler waiting to pounce, a batter gearing up for the fastball, a small forward eyeing the rim. Narrow the parameters to just football, and the possibilities remain legion. He could be a running back awaiting the handoff, a defensive end hell-bent on destroying the quarterback, a strong safety primed for the deep ball.
Styles, 21 years old with an explorer’s heart and a Greek god’s physique, has been all of those things at one time or another in his young life, a singular athletic journey that has led him to this moment: Sunday afternoon at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, where he will make his NFL debut for the Commanders.
His attributes — a body coming in at 6-5, 244 pounds, with unsurpassed athleticism for someone of that size — make it seem as if he were constructed in a lab, or by a gamer in possession of the cheat codes. He is as tall as Calvin Johnson, just a shade lighter than Derrick Henry, roughly as fast (4.47 seconds in the 40-yard dash) as Stefon Diggs when he entered the league.
The fact Styles wound up where he did after all those earlier explorations and iterations — an NFL linebacker, selected by the Commanders with the seventh overall in this year’s draft — is somehow fitting, the closing of a great circle of life. His father, Lorenzo Styles Sr. — the man who scripted Sonny’s athletic journey, introducing him to a variety of sports to see what would stick — was himself an NFL linebacker a generation ago, winning a Super Bowl with the St. Louis Rams in 2000 and spending a total of six years in the league.
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But beyond their shared job title, the way Sonny Styles plays football in 2026 has very little in common with the way Lorenzo Sr. — listed during his playing days as 6-1, 245 pounds, and with a 40 time of 4.7 seconds — did in the late 1990s. Within the long arc of football history that encompasses both of their careers, you can view both the evolution of the sport of football and of the position of linebacker.
“Linebackers are asked to play more in space now, more in pass-coverage,” said Sonny Styles, who starred at his father’s alma mater, Ohio State. “The game is just different — more wide-open, more deep routes. You don’t see as much two-back, downhill-running offenses any more. If you look at linebackers in the ’90s, a lot of them were really big — 250, 260 pounds — and maybe not as fast. It’s not that they weren’t athletic, but the game has evolved to where a linebacker today has to be really athletic, because you have to move all over the field.”
At his best, though, Styles isn’t merely a representation of the new breed of NFL linebacker. His unique set of skills, athleticism and background — he began his collegiate career as a safety and only shifted to linebacker ahead of his junior year — suggest he is something new altogether, something for which the NFL may not even have a word yet, as the game shifts towards positionlessness in much the same way the NBA did.
“Linebacker is a hybrid sort of position now,” said Ken Norton Jr., the Commanders’ linebackers coach, who made three Pro Bowls at the position during a 13-year career that began in 1988. “You have to be strong enough and tough enough to stop the run, but also fast enough to get to the perimeter. Sonny has the ability and the length and the toughness to play every single down. He’s that versatile guy that can play anywhere — “mike” linebacker, “will” linebacker. He can drop back like a safety and cover the tight end. He can take on the running back coming out of the backfield. He can run up against a lineman and be strong enough to handle him. That guy didn’t really exist in my day.
“It’s like in basketball — you’ve got your 7-foot centers and your 6-foot guards. And then you’ve got these 6-9 guys that can play every position. That’s Sonny.”
A Unicorn
Styles has drawn comparisons to other NFL linebackers, most frequently Fred Warner, the four-time All Pro of the San Francisco 49ers — whom Styles has often mentioned as a player he admires. Former Pro Bowl linebacker London Fletcher, who won a Super Bowl alongside Lorenzo Styles Sr. with the 1999 Rams and later anchored Washington’s defense for seven seasons, offered up another name as a comp: Hall-of-Famer Brian Urlacher.
“These guys are unicorns,” Fletcher said. “There’s not a lot of guys like them, with that combination of size, speed and athleticism.”
But in some ways, Styles has as much in common with big, versatile defensive backs who often play closer to the line of scrimmage — think Baltimore Ravens safety Kyle Hamilton and Seattle Seahawks nickelback Nick Emmanwori — as with contemporary linebackers, packing a DB’s athleticism in a linebacker’s body. (At the NFL Combine in February, Styles became the first player of 230+ pounds in at least 23 years to record a sub-4.5 40-yard dash time with a 40-plus-inch vertical jump and an 11-plus-foot broad jump.)
What it means is that the possibilities for Styles in the scheme of first-year defensive coordinator Daronte Jones are almost endless. His coverage abilities and sideline-to-sideline speed at linebacker will give the Commanders ample options in what is expected to be a blitz-heavy scheme. In certain subpackages, the Commanders could even deploy Styles as a “big nickel” or “buffalo nickel” — essentially a third safety, but stationed closer to the line of scrimmage, where he might cover a tight end or slot receiver.
“When you have a guy who can line up at multiple positions, it only benefits you,” said Fletcher. “It puts a lot of pressure on the offense to identify where he’s playing. Is he the outside backer? Inside backer? Is he safety or a nickel? Is he blitzing? Is he in coverage? That’s a lot to decipher.”
Asked whether he considers himself “positionless,” Styles said, “It’s more a matter of being versatile. I want to master the position to where I’m really good, one of the best in the league, at stopping the run. I want to be really good in zone coverage, really good at man coverage. When you master all those things, that’s where people think of you as positionless.”
Commanders safety Jeremy Reaves said Styles is treated as an honorary member of the team’s defensive backs group.
“He’s a jack of all trades,” Reaves said. “He can cover. He can stuff the run. He’s aggressive. I’ve never seen a guy who plays in the box go sideline to sideline like he does. He understands the game at a high level. He’s going to be one of the ones we talk about 30, 40 years down the road.”
A Football Player
According to Styles Sr. (whose namesake, Lorenzo Jr., Sonny’s brother, is a rookie defensive back for the New Orleans Saints), when his boys were little they were exposed to almost every sport available. “I never wanted them to feel like they had to do what Dad did. It took them a long time to figure out I ever played football,” he told Fan Stream Sports Ohio. “They’d hear it more from friends or friends’ parents than they did at home.”
Sonny was known as Alex back then, but his explosive temper put his family in mind of Sonny Corleone, James Caan’s character in “The Godfather” films, and the nickname eventually stuck.
Sonny would soon drop most of his other sports: wrestling, because his sheer size necessitated him taking on kids three or four years older; baseball, because his perfectionist nature couldn’t abide the notion that three hits in 10 at-bats was a good percentage. Aside from football, basketball lasted the longest — he led Pickerington Central High in Ohio to a state championship his final year and received several mid-major Division I scholarship offers.
Once Lorenzo Jr. and Sonny narrowed their focus to their father’s sport, “I raised them to be football players, kind of positionless,” Lorenzo Sr. said. “We talked a lot about being team players. Changing positions, they just thought it was part of the game. It’s just what you do.”
A broken tibia suffered while playing basketball cost Sonny his entire freshman year of high school. In his debut as a sophomore, he had nine tackles, an interception and a blocked punt that he returned for a touchdown. That same night, Ohio State called his coach with a scholarship offer for Styles.
Having pushed himself to graduate high school in three years in the interest of moving up his timeline, Styles, just 17 years old at that point, showed up in Columbus as the highest-ranked safety in the 2022 recruiting class, but it was clear to all involved his future was as a linebacker. When the switch was finally made prior to his junior year, Buckeyes defensive coordinator James Laurinaitis texted him, “Hey man, you’re going to be a first-round linebacker.”
Asked recently about the challenges of making that transition, Styles turned the question around and focused more on the benefits. “Playing safety helped me understand the totality of a defense, like [seeing] the entire picture instead of only a part of it.” The only significant differences, he said, “are that plays are happening faster, because you’re closer to the ball, and the offense is always accounting for you.”
Styles still has only 30 meaningful games under his belt, all of them for the Buckeyes, at the position where he finally landed. He is a linebacker now, and probably will be for as long as he wears an NFL uniform. But within that blanket label, for an athlete such as this, there remain infinite possibilities.
Back there in his low, menacing crouch, fingers dangling near his knees, the snap of the ball an instant away, Styles could still do just about anything.
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