What A Successful Senior Season Looks Like For Quincy Rhodes Jr.

Quincy Rhodes Jr. does not have an anonymity problem anymore. The question the 4th & Five panel put on the table is a harder one: how does a player who already broke through avoid being written off as a one-year fluke?

Rhodes enters his final season in Fayetteville as the most recognizable name on the Arkansas defense. The tape and the numbers back it up.

In 2025 he played all 12 games and started 11, finishing with 44 total tackles, a team-leading 15.5 tackles for loss, eight sacks, six quarterback hurries and a forced fumble. Those 15.5 TFL are the most by an Arkansas defender since Trey Flowers posted the same figure in 2015.

He also became the first Razorback with three multi-sack games in a season since Tre Williams in 2021, and his six-tackle, 2.0-sack, 4.0-TFL afternoon at Memphis made him the first Hog with two-plus sacks and four-plus tackles for loss in a game since Anthony "Juice" Leon in 2010.

The Loud Version Of Success

DJ Williams framed the segment around the obvious benchmarks, the ones fans can see on a stat sheet or a draft board.

"Does he need to have 10 plus sacks? Does he need to be first team all SEC, which would be huge in this conference?" Williams said. "NFL draft stock. If you start seeing that on the boards exploding."

Then he added the one nobody puts on a highlight reel.

"Winning games," Williams said. "I don't know what it is, but you don't see too many guys drafted high on losing teams. They gravitate towards these winning teams."

Nobody on the panel could name a counterexample off the top of their head. Arkansas finished 2025 at 2-10 overall and 0-8 in SEC play.

The Panel's Actual Verdict

That record, more than any sack total, is what the group landed on as the ceiling on Rhodes' national reputation.

"The numbers already there. They already consider him one of the top players in the nation," said Big Z, who joined the segment. "They saying he's on a bad team. We went two and 10 last year. If we win football games, this will be a completely different subject."

He also pointed at where the improvement has to come from.

"We looking better on offense right now, but if the defense step up and help us win these games, it's going to be great," he said.

Grant Cook took the same road from a different direction. His measure of a great season for Rhodes is not a number at all. It is a broadcast booth reflex.

"I think if he's consistently around the ball, consistently making some plays," Cook said. "You know what I'm talking about when the commentators come on and they're like, oh, Quincy Rhodes again. There he is again. He's showing up again."

"It's not even the fact that he's got to go get 12 sacks and 10 tackles for loss this year," Cook said. "I mean, I would love that. I hope he does that. But I think if he is just in and around every play and causing something to happen, then it's just going to continue to skyrocket for him."

Cook expects Arkansas' defensive identity to be built around two jersey numbers this fall.

"I think it's going to be he and Arkansas' No. 6 that all these coaches, when they play Arkansas, are going to say, we got to know where number six is, we got to know where 97 is," Cook said. "And then hopefully somebody else emerges that they're not necessarily paying attention to right now."

Watch: the full 4th & Five breakdown.

The Treylon Burks Blueprint

Williams reached for a recent Arkansas comparison to explain why the box score can lie about a star.

"There was a span there when Burks, he wasn't doing well a couple weeks in a row, but if you watch the tape you just look at what the defense was doing to take him away as an option," Williams said. "Two guys on him. Safety coverage always over the top."

"Treylon Burks being on the field was just as impactful because he opened up stuff for everyone else," he said. "And Quincy could be in that situation."

Which is why, according to Williams, September matters more than November for Rhodes' film.

"This is why it's going to be huge for him early in the season to put on tape," Williams said. "When we go to Utah, when Georgia comes to town, they're going to task that tackle, hey, it's you and Quincy. We're not going to put a tight end over there. We're not going to have a running back chip out of the backfield."

"He needs to establish really early, okay, we can't do that."

Josh Throne argued that adjustment already happened last fall.

"I think they already had to do that last year," Throne said. "If you came out with eight sacks on the season, 15 tackles for loss, if they're already drawing that much attention to you, well, that's going to happen again this year."

His bar for a successful senior season is deliberately not statistical.

"He doesn't have to take the next step statwise," Throne said. "The only thing that I want to see this year is a couple major plays. If he has a handful of disruption type plays that lead to victories, his stats don't really have to do much. Scouts are going to see that. They're going to value that."

Throne pointed back to what he recalled Rhodes saying himself.

How The Staff Can Manufacture More

The back half of the segment turned into a coaching conversation, because there is a lever available to Arkansas here: move him.

Williams noted that when the Hogs were thin up front last season, they leaned on Xavian Sorey Jr. off the edge and slid Rhodes inside. He asked why a defensive coordinator would take an elite rusher off the edge and put him over a guard.

"It depends on what the front is," Cook said. "If you got an elite pass rusher and you're putting them on a guard, guards aren't necessarily going to be as good of pass blockers in space one-on-one as your tackles are going to be."

The bigger reason is help, or the removal of it.

"When someone's keyed like that and the whole offense is paying attention to them, tight ends can give chip help, you can send center, running back that way," Cook said. "When you move them inside, it kind of isolates those folks a little bit more."

He also laid out the blitz-side version of the same idea.

"If you're going to blitz away from where you put your key player, now that guy's in the pass rush and you're going to have to send the slide to the blitz to pick it up," Cook said.

Williams noted that Arkansas has already been repping Rhodes inside during fall camp, and he would like to see more of it.

"I wouldn't mind seeing him at a three technique occasionally," Williams said. "He has the size, has the strength. I think he's almost undervalued as a good run defender as well. He's long, he can get full extension, hold a guy up, let his linebackers run free."

What To Watch

At 6-6 and 276 pounds, the North Little Rock product has the frame to live in both spots, and a staff that can move him is a staff that can create the one-on-one it wants instead of waiting for one.

The panel's verdict was consistent even when the metrics differed. The sack number is nice. The wins are the thing.

Watch the trip to Utah and the day Georgia comes to town. If offenses are still building protections around 97 and the Hogs are stacking wins because of it, the rest of the conversation takes care of itself.