Rueben Bain Jr. is widely considered one of the top prospects in the 2026 NFL Draft. The star University of Miami edge rusher dominated throughout the 2025 season, including during the Canes’ College Football Playoff run to the National Championship Game, where he picked up a sack against presumptive No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza.
But Bain is also somewhat of a polarizing prospect because he does not have the prototypical size for his position. In fact, he has an extremely atypical size, as we saw on Thursday morning when the NFL conducted measurements for edge rushers at the NFL Scouting Combine.
Bain’s arms measured just 30 7/8 inches long, giving him some of the shortest arms for an edge rusher in recent Combine history.
Courtesy of Mockdraftable, here’s the list of edge rushers with arms that measured 31 inches or shorter since 1999. As you can see, it’s not an extensive list, and Bain checks in with the fifth-shortest arms of the entire group. (Pending the measurements for the rest of this class.)
| Cashius Howell |
2026 |
Texas A&M |
30 1/4″ |
| Nate Williams |
2013 |
Ohio State |
30 5/8″ |
| Sutton Smith |
2019 |
Northern Illinois |
30 3/4″ |
| Tyree Johnson |
2022 |
Texas A&M |
30 7/8″ |
| Rueben Bain Jr. |
2026 |
Miami |
30 7/8″ |
| Ricky Elmore |
2011 |
Arizona |
31″ |
| Cheta Ozougwu |
2011 |
Rice |
31″ |
| Dean Lowry |
2016 |
Northwestern |
31″ |
| Wyatt Hubert |
2021 |
Kansas State |
31″ |
| Elijah Ponder |
2021 |
Cincinnati |
31″ |
| Ethan Downs |
2025 |
Oklahoma |
31″ |
But we also already knew this about Bain entering the week. In fact, it was on our list of the 10 most anticipated storylines for combine week.
Bain is considered arguably the top edge rusher in this draft class, but he’s also one of its most polarizing prospects. He plays with incredible power and has the production to match his reputation, but NFL teams prioritize measurements on the edge and Bain is likely to fall short of some bench marks when he has his arms measured. How short he falls and whether teams decide to care a lot about that will be one of the biggest stories of the week.
Now, here we are. Bain measured in with the same T-rex-style arms many expected him to have. The question is, does it really matter? For Bain himself, it’s a non-issue.
“People keep bringing that up out of nowhere, but no teams brought it up to me, so I don’t bring it up either,” Bain stated, via ESPN. “As long as I just talk the talk and walk the walk, play with technique, nobody actually cares about it.”
When you bring up the list of sack leaders from the 2025 season, though, you do find that a player like Bain (or Howell, for that matter) would be a significant outlier when it comes to sack production if he were to succeed on that level. That’s likely to matter to (some) teams on at least some level.
Of course, there is more to being an edge rusher than racking up sacks, and anyway, Bain showed throughout his college career that the arm length couldn’t stop him from doing that, either.
Despite those short arms, Bain was repeatedly able to get inside of tackles’ bodies to punch and move them with relative ease. He was able to overpower them at the point of attack, bend around them on the edge and beat them to the inside. He was able to stack and shed them in the run game, making plays at and behind the line of scrimmage.
He has a reliable set of moves and counter-moves that complement an elite trait — his power. Couple that with the speed, quickness, hand placement and more present on his tape and you get an idea of why he was effective enough to rack up the second-most pressures in the country during the 2025 regular season, and why he was perhaps even more devastatingly effective during Miami’s playoff run, where he picked up another 24 pressures and five sacks in four games against Texas A&M, Ohio State, Mississippi and Indiana.
Bain will indeed have to be a physical outlier to find great success in the pros, but that was something we already knew before he checked in with these measurements. Teams shouldn’t double-count it now just because the measurements are official. They should of course take it into account, just like any other factor in their evaluation, but they shouldn’t let it overshadow the tremendous traits and production that made him such a success in college.
