USC’s Taylor Mays confident he can make transition to NFL

Taylor Mays has just about everything an NFL team could want.

The USC safety has a granite physique, scorching speed, an undeniable work ethic and comes from an exceptional family. He appears to be, well, a tailor-made top-five pick.

Then why all the speculation that he could slip into the teens or deeper in next month’s draft?

Depends on whom you ask. A lot of NFL evaluators say Mays isn’t a playmaker, impressive as his “measurables” are. After vowing to prove that he had soft hands to match his quick feet, Mays had one interception last season.

So at USC’s campus pro day Wednesday, the four-year starter set out to show representatives from every NFL team that he has the skills to succeed at the next level.

“They know I can run fast. They know I can hit and all that stuff,” he said. “But being able to be a big safety and being able to move is my biggest thing. I think that’s the biggest question mark.”

To hear Mays tell it, he was somewhat handcuffed by the Trojans’ defensive scheme and could have made more plays on the ball had he been put in position to do so. As it was, he led the team with 96 tackles.

In the Senior Bowl, where he was coached by the staff of the Miami Dolphins, he made a heads-up interception at the goal line.

Mays said those coaches told him to look for the ball rather than zero in on receivers.

“In the NFL, you get paid to get interceptions … “ he said. “It started to pay off once I started to look for the ball. I know I can do it. I wasn’t really coached just to do that at USC, but I know I can make that transition.”

Mays passed on a chance to run the 40-yard dash because he did more than enough in that department at the scouting combine. Although some scouts timed him at a blistering 4.24 seconds in Indianapolis, teams eventually agreed on a still-impressive time of 4.31.

Football is a big man’s game, but Mays’ extraordinary size (6 feet 3, 230 pounds) could be a detriment in the eyes of some evaluators.

“He’s OK in space, but you don’t want him in tons of space,” a team scout said Wednesday. “His size almost hurts him. A little bit of a smaller man might move around a little better, even if he’s not as good an athlete.”

That scout said Mays “held serve” Wednesday, neither boosting nor damaging his stock in any significant way.

Seattle is among the teams that need a safety, and it has the sixth and 14th picks. There was a Seahawks representative at USC on Wednesday, but it wasn’t former Trojans coach Pete Carroll, who spent Wednesday at Texas’ pro day.

Carroll said he knows his former players so well that it gives him an opportunity to evaluate his scouting department and see whether his opinions mesh with the scouts’.

“I have a very clear picture of those [USC] guys,” he said recently. “It’s a very good opportunity for me to watch the process, to see how [Seahawks scouts] come together with their thoughts, and compare my assessment, and we’ll see how this whole process works out.”

Watching from the USC sideline Wednesday was the safety’s father, Stafford Mays, a former NFL defensive lineman who’s now a senior public-relations executive at Microsoft. His wife, Laurie Black, is an executive vice president at Nordstrom.

The elder Mays said his son and other USC players are well aware of what people are saying about them, good and bad, on the Internet.

“I just tell him to have fun with it,” Stafford said. “People are going to write what they’re going to write, say what they’re going to say. But the only opinions that really matter are the people here, the scouts, GMs, and all those people. That’s what counts.”

He said his son has 5% body fat, has always been incredibly disciplined and once considered skipping his high school prom because he wanted to get up early the next morning to run hills.

“The guy is so focused,” he said, “and he doesn’t want anything to go wrong.”

Extra points

Defensive end Everson Griffen impressed a lot of scouts with his workout, and ran the 40 in 4.59 seconds, very fast for a big man. … Receiver Damian Williams didn’t run the 40 but looked sharp running patterns and catching passes. At least one scout said Williams had the workout of the day: “He was quick out of his breaks and was really crisp in his routes. He looked explosive even though he’s not an overly fast guy.”… Running back Stafon Johnson, returning from a near-fatal weightlifting accident, ran a 4.62-second 40 and is widely projected to be a late-round pick or a free-agent signee.

sam.farmer@latimes.com

twitter.com/LATimesfarmer