Cornerback is the one position of need for the Green Bay Packers that is projected to be deeper than average in the area of the draft the Packers will actually pick in, as they’ll be out of their first-round picks for the next two years. We’re slowly chipping through some cornerback prospects for the 2026 draft here at Acme Packing Company, and already have scouting reports up on Alabama’s Domani Jackson and Washington’s Tacario Davis. Today, though, we’re here to talk about Arkansas’ Julian Neal,
a lengthy former receiver and basketball player who will probably be picked on Day 2 this year.
Background
Neal played prep football at Mission High School in San Francisco, California, where he played safety, along with wide receiver (all-city) and basketball (all-city). Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, he did not have a senior season before signing his letter of intent to Fresno State.
As a recruit, the only offers he received were from Fresno State, San Jose State and the FCS’ Eastern Washington. Overall, he was considered to be the 1,068th high school player in the 2021 class, per 247Sports’ composite rankings, making him the 136th California product and the 128th “athlete” in the cycle. “Athlete” is a designation given to a player who can play multiple positions. Neal was looked at as both a receiver and a defensive back at the next level.
According to the charting data, Neal only played 11 snaps of defense over his first two years at Fresno State, despite playing in seven games combined over 2021 and 2022. He took a redshirt year in 2021, but didn’t see the field much in 2022, either.
By 2023, he started getting involved more in the outside cornerback rotation for the Bulldogs, playing 103 snaps. In 2024, he was a full-time starter for the first time, playing 450 snaps at outside cornerback. Then, things got funky with his coaching situation.
In 2022 and 2023, he played for head coach Jeff Tedford, who was also Aaron Rodgers’ head coach at Cal. Before the 2024 season, Tedford stepped away to deal with a health issue (this has happened before with Tedford, notably during the 2014 season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and after the 2019 season, his first stint with Fresno State).
The interim head coach for the Bulldogs in 2024 was Tim Skipper, the former assistant head coach and linebackers coach of the team. Skipper had previously been the head coach for the team’s bowl game in 2023, after Tedford stepped away.
After the 2024 season, when the Bulldogs went 4-3 in conference, 6-7 overall and lost the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl in a double overtime game against Northern Illinois, Skipper was let go (he resurfaced at UCLA, where he was again named an interim head coach in 2025). Less than a week after Fresno State hired Matt Entz, former USC assistant head coach and North Dakota State head coach, Neal hit the portal.
Neal, a high school honor roll student, had the grades to transfer to Stanford as a graduate, which is fairly rare. For perspective, Stanford has told plenty of starters in the past that they had the grades to play for them as undergraduates, but that once they graduated, they didn’t have the grades to remain on the roster as graduate students. It’s actually a pretty big deal that Neal, who held an accounting degree from Fresno State, was able to transfer into Stanford as a redshirt senior.
Then the Cardinals fired Troy Taylor in March, after he had twice been investigated for his treatment of fellow athletic department employees. Because of the coaching change, Neal hit the transfer portal for the second time in a single offseason, and he was considered to be one of the biggest names in the spring portal window. Neal was hardly the only Stanford player to leave after Taylor was fired, too. Notably, David Bailey of Texas Tech, currently considered a top-10 prospect in the upcoming NFL draft, also left the Cardinal in the spring.
In the portal, Neal was ranked the 73rd overall player in the class by 247Sports. Those rankings included both winter and spring portal transfers.
He ended up at Arkansas, where he earned his second season as a full-time starter at the college level, despite missing all of spring practice with the Razorbacks.
Neal is a little bit on the older side, as he’ll turn 23 years old in February. And for what it’s worth, his brother, EJ Neal, is a guard on USC’s basketball team.
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Scouting Report
The first things that stand out about Neal are his size and his ball skills. The wide receiver/basketball background really shows up across the board.
He measured in at 6’1.5” and 202 pounds at the Senior Bowl. He also has 33 1/8th” arms, which are in the 94th percentile of cornerbacks according to Mockdraftable. In his final two years of college football, his two years as a full-time starter, he posted 16 total pass breakups and brought in four interceptions.
I don’t believe that the Packers are going to be a press-man coverage team under Jonathan Gannon, whose defenses have played quarters coverages more than any team in the NFL over the last five seasons, but Arkansas did play a decent amount of it this year. Often, Neal doesn’t show a great ability of being able to use that length when pressed up on receivers, which ends up making him look flat-footed when he misses his initial strike. A clip below shows a rep of Neal in one-on-ones at the Senior Bowl, which is a taste of what his lowlights look like.
With that being said, he does have solid movement skills, even if it takes him a while to build up to full speed. He’ll never get beat deep without at least making it a contested catch, but he can fall behind on digs and crossing routes. I’m assuming that he’ll run in the 4.5s in the 40-yard dash this draft season. What’s interesting is that his click-close ability is pretty good when he has to trigger downhill. He’s a lot faster going downhill suddenly than in coverage for some reason. That may be a growth opportunity, depending on how he runs.
Speaking of his ability to go downhill, he fights blocks on screens and sticks his nose into a ball-carrier when given the chance. It’s no surprise that he tackles a little high, considering his frame, but he uses his arms to bring guys down instead of solely relying on going low with his pads, like some smaller cornerbacks.
Ultimately, I view him as a solid mover who needs a LOT of growth if he’s going to be playing in a press-man scheme (not many of them left in 2026), but should be more valued by teams who will want him to play off coverage, where his size and ball skills are ready to have an impact on games already. He doesn’t have a ton of experience under his belt, so there’s a chance that the arrow continues to go up year-over-year. Neal is very much an outside cornerback who you probably don’t want in the slot. He looks the part of a Day 2 selection to me.
