Eleven BYU players landed on the 2027 Shriners Children’s East-West Bowl watch list Tuesday. That is a nice July receipt. It is also a much better roster test than a trophy.
The list has 1,000 draft-eligible players from across college football. Nobody just received an invitation to Arlington, and a watch-list mention does not tell us where a player will be drafted. What it does tell us is where evaluators have started their homework. BYU has enough older, physically credible players to keep scouts busy on both sides of the ball.
The 11 Cougars are Raider Damuni, Andrew Gentry, Isaiah Glasker, Evan Johnson, LJ Martin, Bruce Mitchell, Faletau Satuala, Bodie Schoonover, Kyle Sfarcioc, Keanu Tanuvasa and Cade Uluave.
Seven play defense. Four play offense. There is no quarterback, receiver or tight end in the group. Three are offensive linemen, and seven of the 11 are redshirt seniors. In other words, this is not a preseason skill-position popularity contest. It is a list built around grown-man football.
That gives BYU fans a useful way to read it. If these 11 play to the level their names suggest, the Cougars have the spine for another serious Big 12 run. If several become names that looked better in July than they did in October, the younger parts of the roster will have to cover a lot of ground.
The list likes BYU where BYU needs to be old
Start with the offensive line. Gentry, Mitchell and Sfarcioc are all redshirt seniors. The current roster lists Gentry at 6-foot-8 and 315 pounds, Mitchell at 6-foot-4 and 300, and Sfarcioc at 6-foot-4 and 310.
Size is the easy part. The harder number is experience: the three have 121 combined college games and 61 starts in the career totals available through BYU Sport Nuts’ official-data cache.
That does not name BYU’s opening-day five. It should not be treated as a depth chart leak, either. It says the veteran candidates in the room already have a lot of film. For a team working through a young-quarterback era, that matters more than one extra preseason compliment at receiver.
BYU needs the line to make ordinary downs feel ordinary. Keep the pocket clean enough that the quarterback can stay on schedule. Give Martin a crease before first contact. Avoid turning second-and-7 into a weekly spiritual trial. Gentry, Mitchell and Sfarcioc do not have to become three NFL draft picks for the watch list to mean something. They do have to make the experience visible.
The defensive side carries the same age profile. Glasker, Johnson, Schoonover and Tanuvasa are redshirt seniors. Damuni and Uluave are seniors. Satuala, a junior, is the lone underclassman in the full 11.
This is where the watch list turns into a deadline. BYU is not waiting for an interesting defense to mature someday. Most of the recognized core is playing on a 2026 clock.
Four names already have loud production
The cleanest cases are Martin, Glasker, Johnson and Tanuvasa.
Martin’s cached career line is 2,541 rushing yards and 23 rushing touchdowns on 482 carries, plus 57 catches for 398 yards. He is the offensive player every opponent can identify before the first meeting. The question is not whether he can carry BYU’s run game. It is how often he should have to.
The watch-list mention strengthens the case for a sensible workload, not a heroic one. BYU has nine running backs on the roster. A season with Arizona in Week 2, Notre Dame in October and the Utah game opening a four-week November grind cannot become a contest to see how much contact Martin absorbs.
Glasker’s career totals jump off the page: 140 tackles, 23 tackles for loss, 6.5 sacks and five interceptions. That is not a one-trick edge profile. He has produced behind the line and in coverage, which is exactly the kind of range that makes a linebacker worth tracking before draft season gets serious.
Johnson has seven career interceptions and 17 passes defended in the current cache. Tanuvasa has 16.5 tackles for loss and six sacks. Put those numbers next to Martin’s production and the list has a clear top shelf: players with enough college evidence that 2026 is about sharpening the case, not introducing themselves.
Those four also sit in rooms BYU cannot fake. Martin sets the floor for the offense. Glasker gives the linebacker group disruption. Johnson gives the secondary a proven ball producer. Tanuvasa gives the interior front a veteran who can finish plays behind the line. Take away any two of those functions and the roster starts asking harder questions elsewhere.
The next tier can change BYU’s ceiling
Damuni, Satuala and Schoonover are more interesting because their careers leave room for a bigger final statement.
Damuni has 90 career tackles across 35 games in the cache. Satuala has 93 tackles, 7.5 tackles for loss and four interceptions through 26 games. Schoonover has 44 tackles, seven tackles for loss and three sacks through 36 games.
None of those lines needs inflated language. They are experienced players with evidence, plus space between what they have done and what a full breakout season would look like.
Satuala is the obvious age outlier. He is also listed at 6-foot-4, a frame that naturally gets attention in a defensive back evaluation. The important work now is football work: reliable angles, open-field tackling, coverage decisions and enough weekly consistency that the measurables stop being the lead.
Schoonover has a similar opportunity on the edge. BYU lists 11 defensive ends, many of them young. A redshirt senior with 36 games should be the player who makes that youth easier to manage. If he turns pressure into finished snaps, the entire front gets more flexible. If not, the staff may have to speed up a developmental timeline for somebody behind him.
Damuni and Uluave give BYU two more senior defenders in the watch-list group. Uluave’s current player record does not yet carry the same complete career-stat receipt in our cache, so there is no reason to manufacture one. The roster fact still matters: the NFL evaluation process has put both seniors on the initial board, and BYU needs their experience now rather than as an abstract leadership talking point.
What this does and does not say about BYU’s NFL pipeline
The official BYU release notes that 72 former Cougars have played in the East-West Shrine Bowl, beginning with Reed Nilsen in 1947. Chase Roberts and Garrison Grimes represented BYU in the game last January. LaVell Edwards coached the West team five times.
That history gives the current list context, but it does not make 11 invitations inevitable. The watch list is the start of the selection process. The actual game is scheduled for Feb. 4, 2027, at AT&T Stadium, and the roster will be much smaller than 1,000 names.
For BYU, the better goal is to make the list look conservative by November.
If the three veteran linemen stabilize the offense, Martin stays productive without getting ground down, and the seven defenders give BYU weekly answers at every level, NFL attention will take care of itself. The Cougars will also have a team capable of handling the part of the 2026 schedule that does not care about watch lists: TCU, Iowa State, Notre Dame, Utah and the rest of a league that has learned BYU is not visiting for the scenery.
The fan takeaway is pretty simple. Eleven names on a 1,000-player list is not draft night. It is proof that BYU’s veteran core has entered the evaluation room.
Now that core has to hold up the roster.
Sources and further reading
- Official BYU Athletics: Eleven Cougars included on the Shriners Children’s East-West Bowl watch list, including the 11 names, game date and BYU’s Shrine Bowl history
- BYU Sport Nuts official-data pages: 2026 football roster, football player index and 2026 schedule
- Official BYU Athletics data sources used for roster and player context: 2026 roster API and BYU’s public player-stat records, cached in our football data layer
- Related BYU Sport Nuts analysis: fall camp pressure map, Keanu Tanuvasa’s defensive-front value and Bruce Mitchell’s center standard
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