{"id":266177,"date":"2026-04-25T19:19:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T19:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/266177\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T19:19:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T19:19:09","slug":"texas-s-austin-native-goes-in-nfl-draft-5th-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/266177\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas S, Austin native goes in NFL draft 5th round"},"content":{"rendered":"

He’s the xth Longhorn to be drafted, with several other Texas\u00a0teammates expected to hear their names called this weekend.<\/p>\n

An Austin native who helped Westlake High School<\/a> win back-to-back state championships, Taaffe played five seasons at Texas after one of the unlikiest\u00a0careers in Longhorn history. He didn’t have any recruiting stars out of\u00a0Westlake and originally committed to Rice as a walk-on before joining Texas as a walk-on. He eventually received a scholarship and played in 53 games with 36 starts at Texas, earned second-team All-American honors from the Associated Press in 2024 and picked up all-conference honors in both the Big 12 and the SEC. Taaffe ended his career with 222 tackles, seven interceptions and 21 passes defended.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Taaffe joins the NFL one year after fellow Texas defensive backs Jahdae Barron and Andrew Mukuba were both taken within the first two rounds of the 2025 draft. Fellow defensive\u00a0back Malik Muhammad <\/a>was taken a round earlier. Texas has now had nine of its defensive backs drafted over the previous 11 years.<\/p>\n

Taaffe will try and become the 12th player from Westlake to play in the NFL, joining a list that includes former Super Bowl MVPs in quarterbacks Drew Brees and Nick Foles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He’s the xth Longhorn to be drafted, with several other Texas\u00a0teammates expected to hear their names called this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[21872,132,134,133,261,6183,537,536],"class_list":{"0":"post-266177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-2026-nfl-draft","9":"tag-austin","10":"tag-austin-headlines","11":"tag-austin-news","12":"tag-college-football","13":"tag-nfl-draft","14":"tag-texas-longhorns","15":"tag-texas-longhorns-football"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}