Numbers don't lie: Titans first-round pick JC Latham is unlike anyone football has seen
JC Latham already has a pretty good nickname. Let's propose a second: The 99th Percentile.
David Ballou, director of sports performance for Alabama football, knows why it fits. Ballou has worked at Alabama since 2020, shaping behemoth offensive linemen-turned-top-draft picks like Evan Neal, Alex Leatherwood and Landon Dickerson. Before that, he trained future NFL stalwarts Mike McGlinchey and Quenton Nelson at Notre Dame.
If anyone knows what the 99th percentile of size, power and makeup looks like for an offensive lineman, it's Ballou. And he has seen it in Latham.
"The best way to say it is we’ve got a power profile for all of our players here," Ballou told The Tennessean. "Ten exercises, 0-10 scale. We always tell guys to think of it like a 'Madden' scale, 0-100 . . . An elite score for a guy up front is anything above 80. JC was a 96. JC was the highest offensive lineman score we’ve had since I’ve been here or anywhere else I’ve been."
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Latham is prodigiously strong. The Tennessee Titans' first-round pick and left tackle of the future says he can squat 1,000 pounds, and Ballou saw Latham rep 500 pounds on the bench press twice just days before the SEC championship game.
But Alabama doesn't care so much about strength. The Crimson Tide machine is built on power. Ballou is concerned less with how much weight players can put on a bar and more about how quickly players can move their weight and to what degree they can control the bar.
Ballou is quantifying explosiveness, the trait coaches covet and what separates average players from great ones.
Latham's explosiveness is top-of-the-charts level impressive. As is his physical makeup.
"What everybody always says when they watch JC is JC is a huge 6-foot-6, 345-pound kid that moves and looks like an athletic linebacker," Ballou said. "When you look at his body, he’s not fat. We at one point on a scan had 272 pounds of lean mass on JC. I’ve never seen that number before on anybody I’ve tested. That’s a DXA scan, the most accurate body composition scan you can have.
"I’m saying all that to say the kid is special."
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George Hegamin has seen Latham's 99th percentile qualities firsthand. Better yet, he might've been the first person to properly recognize them. Hegamin, the director of leadership and engagement for Colorado football, was the offensive line coach at IMG Academy when Latham transferred in as a rising high school junior.
Latham was a defensive end at the time, and a darn good one, already ranking among the top 10 in his recruiting class. But as Hegamin remembers it, he pulled IMG coach Kevin Wright aside after a couple of practices to tell him he thought they had a future first-round pick who was out of position. Wright liked the idea of a position change, but Hegamin had to run it by Latham.
"Especially being at IMG, coming there as a defensive end, you’d think he’d look at that and say, ‘I’m doing this or I’m not doing anything,' " Hegamin said. "His attitude was, ‘If you think I can do it, then I want to try it.’ He went from trying it to working on it to doing it to being very efficient at it. Next thing you know he’s getting a scholarship to Alabama."
Hegamin has continued working with Latham, and was with the family in Detroit the night before the NFL draft. A former NFL offensive lineman himself who spent time with Dallas, Philadelphia and Tampa Bay, Hegamin raves about the traits he believes set Latham up most directly for success.
"The kid has an ability to compartmentalize at a very unique level," he said. "All the players that I’ve played with throughout my career, the Hall of Fame players and the Pro Bowl players, they have the ability to compartmentalize in ways average people can’t even dream of. There’s not a thing that’s going to bother him. There’s not a thing that’s going to control how he goes about his business."
Latham calls this hunting for triggers. Off the field, he's a happy-go-lucky guy. Hegamin calls him jovial. Ballou describes him as the consummate considerate teammate. But when he straps the helmet on, all Latham needs is the smallest, tiniest, most minute trigger to send him into a rage. He's essentially Bobby Boucher in "The Waterboy," but instead of being triggered by imaginary taunts about Gatorade's superiority to H2O, he fumes about defensive linemen who dare to line up across from him without taking their grills out of their mouths.
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These triggers activate Latham's "Trench King" persona. And if there's one thing Trench King loves, it's flattening defenders. He pancaked defenders 41 times in 2023, including a career-high seven in one game against Mississippi State. By comparison, Neal played 199 more snaps in his All-America season in 2021 at Alabama than Latham did in 2023 and had just 34 knockdown blocks.
All of this — the power and the herculean build and the compartmentalization and the Boucher-esque targeted aggression — adds up to Latham being an offensive lineman with the potential to be molded into an all-timer.
Which is another part of Latham's game that Hegamin thinks goes underrated: the coachability. Hegamin says Latham routinely asks questions he already knows the answer to just to make 100% sure he's doing things the right way. Latham tells a similar story about meeting Titans offensive line coach Bill Callahan and peppering him with two hours worth of questions in what was supposed to be a 30-minute meeting.
There's no way to fake Latham's size, strength and power. But there's also no substitute for his inquisitiveness, his appetite for consuming the information he needs to know to be the best version of himself. Ballou says many of the toughest conversations he has had with Latham were about Latham's tendency to overdo things, to push himself a little too far.
His drive has taken him from a championship-winning high school in Wisconsin to the country's preeminent football feeder school in IMG to the gold standard for college football at Alabama all the way to the Titans, where he gets to work with one of the best offensive line coaches who has ever lived.
"There’s not much more you can ask for if you’re the type of player who wants to be a great player," Hegamin said. "He certainly has that."
Yet another instance of Latham being in the 99th percentile.
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Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at nsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: JC Latham, Tennessee Titans' future, has power, body without precedent
