It’s been a long and winding road for Oregon DT Jamaree Caldwell to get to where he is now. He spent a year at Independence Community College in JUCO football before getting an offer from Houston. That Houston offer alone felt like the end of a feel-good story for Caldwell, but it was only just the beginning on his path to now becoming a draftable player for the upcoming 2025 NFL Draft out of the University of Oregon.
His Houston player page shows “Unique fact: gave up on football once,” and references his best advice being “quit now, you quit forever – that made him start playing football again.”
I asked him about this period of his life after one of the Senior Bowl practices to figure out exactly what happened.
“I gotta stop saying the word quit,” Caldwell said. “I had took some time off to help my mother during 2020. COVID came around, nobody knew how that was gonna pan out for anything. Nobody knew how long football was gonna take to come back. I just knew it was a situation where some money had to be made and I had to stay home and help for a good bit of time. She probably didn’t need me as much as I thought she needed me, but I just stayed home to help my family.”
Caldwell graduated from Newberry High School in South Carolina in 2019 and then went to Hutchinson Community College for his first stop in JUCO football. It was during that 2020 COVID season that he took a step away from the sport. He put on a bunch of weight and wasn’t sure if he would return to football.
“If you know my background, I’ve been through a lot of difficult things when it comes down to football,” Caldwell said about the mental toughness required to play the sport at this level. “I won’t say it doesn’t compare to what I’ve been through JUCO-wise, but it’s pretty similar. You just gotta put your head down and keep going.”
What fuels him to push forward?
“My inspiration is not wanting to be a person that had an opportunity and haven’t taken it and messed up on doing things that you ain’t supposed to do,” Caldwell said. “I I feel like I just don’t want to be a guy that’s around at home. I always wanted to travel.”
A running back in pee-wee football, Caldwell primarily played offensive line in high school along with some defensive tackle.
At the Senior Bowl, Caldwell measured in at 6020, 342 pounds. That suggests he is a 0-tech, two-gapping defensive lineman who primarily plays against the run. Even at that size, he proved that he is much more than that at the Senior Bowl. He consistently burst into the backfield and flashed way more speed than you would expect from a player his size.
He was one of the big standouts in Mobile at the Senior Bowl. Just look at this clip from Ryan Fowler on X.
That movement ability is nice, but he is still a player who bases his game on power.
“Right down the middle of them,” Caldwell said when I asked what his fastball is as a pass rusher. “You gotta set it up with the bull rush. Get the bull rush going. I’m somebody that’s willing to learn, somebody that’s willing to bounce back from adversity and somebody that’s willing to, I use my little term, die in the trenches. And not allow somebody to just bully you out of the trenches.”
It will likely depend on what teams want from him, but if he hopes to be on the field for more than 30 or 40 percent of the snaps in any given game, he is going to need to drop a little weight. He acknowledged that is one of his biggest goals leading up to his first NFL season.
“I need to work on shedding some weight before the NFL season,” Caldwell said. “[Get to] around 325 or 320.”
That would require him shedding roughly 20 pounds this offseason, which he said can mostly be accomplished through nutrition and watching his cravings.
If he can get to that weight, he feels like he can be a pretty versatile player all over the interior of the defensive line.
“My best fit, I would say is a three-tech player,” Caldwell said. “I feel like I could play all of them. I feel like I’m comfortable at every single interior position, but you could say three tech.”
He appeared to have the pass-rush juice to play that position, but at his current size he would be more of a zero-, one-, or two-i defender.
I asked Caldwell if he’d noticed Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin paying close attention to his position group at practice.
“That’s pretty motivational,” Caldwell said. “I heard him talking and motivating guys in the background. It is nice to hear that, but I feel like I dialed all that out. I was just strictly football.”
He had not spoken with the Steelers as of the second day of practice, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t while down in Mobile, and there are plenty of other steps throughout the pre-draft process to do so.
Unfortunately for Caldwell, he suffered an apparent lower-body injury on the final day of practice in Mobile. It is unclear how severe it was, but that was a disappointing ending to a very strong week.
