Myron Cunningham, Arkansas Football News: Draft Scout Player News

08/19/21 - OT Myron Cunningham, rSr/2022, Arkansas

Jimmy Smith coaches running backs for the University of Arkansas, but as a former quarterback at Tennessee State he also has an acute awareness of what an offensive tackle means to that position. Specifically, Smith knows what left tackle Myron Cunningham means as the blindside protector for new starting quarterback KJ Jefferson. "Dependable," Smith said when asked for his thoughts on Cunningham's importance. "That's what you want. Dependable. "He's going to give you what you need every game, and you can rely on him. I played quarterback, so a guy like Myron is a big deal. "At left tackle, you need somebody you can rely on. He's a dependable guy. That's what he is."

Cunningham was so dependable last season that he played all 705 offensive snaps as well as 42 on special teams. He's also a big deal physically at 6-6 and 325 pounds. "Myron is a great, awesome player to me," said Jefferson, a redshirt sophomore with two career starts. "Protecting my blindside, I have no worries because he perfects the little details and even gets extra work. "He comes in and talks to me about different stuff and what he saw protection-wise and why he called this protection and what he wants to slide to." Cunningham, a fifth-year senior from Warren, Ohio, could be in an NFL training camp right now. Instead, he's back for his third season as a starter after also playing two seasons at Iowa Central Community College. "He turned down several hundreds of thousands of dollars, in my opinion," Razorbacks Coach Sam Pittman said at SEC Media Days last month. "We have a process, and it looked like he was going to go high in the middle rounds of the NFL Draft last year. "He elected to come back. That tells you something about our coaching staff. Not myself, about our assistant coaching staff." - Northwest Arkansas Times

rSr/2022