2015 Wide Receiver and Tight End Prospects

A year ago we were witness to an unusually talented receiver pool in the draft, and it certainly showed on the field. Last season’s rookie receiver class was without question the best in history, unusual production from a position that normally struggles to transition from college to the NFL. Every team is aware of this, and coaches and executives now have to ask themselves if this will be a trend going forward. Everyone wants to find the next Odell Beckham or Mike Evans. I’m not certain if there are players of that immediate impact to be found in this year’s class, but there are certainly a lot of very intriguing options.

Amari Cooper – WR, Alabama

Popular opinion has started to drift in a different direction, but I haven’t changed my opinion since this process started. Amari Cooper is the best wide receiver in the draft and among the top five overall players. He is as polished as receivers come entering the league, and even though his physical ability doesn’t match up with other top receiving prospects, he has an abundance of skill that more than makes up for this athletic shortfall.

Cooper’s gift is his route running ability. He has the sort of quick twitch balance and acceleration that has made Antonio Brown the best receiver in the league over the past two seasons. Defensive backs simply cannot keep up with him when he changes directions, making him almost unstoppable on curl and out patterns.

He does a lot of subtle things to create space with his routes. He shows fantastic ability to read coverage and adjust his routes as the play develops. If he reads zone, he will cut off any double moves in order to get on with his route, eliminating unnecessary flourishes to get where he needs to go. Many receivers know how to settle into holes in zones, but Cooper has the ability to bend zones to create holes. He will dip outside to widen a defender before bending back over the middle, opening a lane for a quarterback to throw into. His fakes include his hips as well as his shoulders, his fluidity allowing him to pivot back around and blow past a defender while they’re still fumbling to find their footing.

The reason Cooper has fallen out of the top spot in some analysts’ eyes has more to do with the receivers behind him than with him. This draft class is loaded with physical specimens, and Cooper is merely above average athletically. He’s only 6’1” and ran only a 4.44 forty, both excellent marks but not the earth shattering numbers posted by a receiver like Kevin White. And his lack of athletic dominance does show up on the field, where he doesn’t offer much as a deep threat and rarely wins jump balls.

If you want to get picky, you can find other things to complain about with Cooper. He can sometimes be overpowered by press coverage, though he’s usually quick enough that the defender can’t get his hands on him. He has a habit of pushing off when the ball is in the air and could draw penalties at the next level. These are minor concerns, the sort you could find in any prospect. When it comes down to it, Cooper is still the best wide receiver in the draft, and I don’t think you’d be saying anything ridiculous if you called him the best player overall.

Devante Parker – WR, Louisville

I’m higher on Parker than most draft analysts. He is almost universally agreed to be a player worthy of going in the top half of the first round, but I am one of the few who truly believes he is a top ten player. A tall and lanky receiver, he boasts a unique collection of skills that could make him one of the best receivers in the league for years down the road.

I can see why some people aren’t as high on Parker. He struggles against press coverage, his tall and skinny frame making it easy for defenders to get into his chest and control him. He doesn’t do much with his arms to help him disengage, relying only on initial burst to get past defenders. He will also sometimes allow defenders to dip underneath him on inside breaking routes, and he needs to get better at using his long body to box out.

The biggest problem with Parker is that his route running is very raw, more than you would expect from a player who played four years of high level college football. He shows the ability to make sharp breaks on his routes, but he also leans hard to give away where he’s going and has a habit of rounding off his inside breaking routes. Part of this is technique, and part of it is mechanical. His long strides make it difficult to make the sort of quick, sharp breaks you would see from receivers like Cooper, and because of this he may have difficulty ever developing these traits.

These are all issues, and they are what keep him from being on the same level as Cooper. But the things Parker does well, he does very, very well. He is the best jump ball receiver in the class, always attacking the ball at its highest point and extending his arms to their full length to pluck it out of the air. He will be an immediate contributor as a red zone threat, and his incredible catch radius will make him best friends for whatever quarterback he is paired with.

He is also probably the best receiver in the draft when it comes to run after the catch, something you wouldn’t expect just based on his long and skinny body. But he plays much more physical than he looks and has a preternatural gift for finding and exploiting the open space on the field. His combination of length and agility is something very rare in the NFL, and for this reason I am willing to overlook some of his rawness to call him a top ten player in the class.

Kevin White – WR, West Virginia

White has been shooting up draft boards over the past few weeks, and current consensus seems to be that it’s a toss up between him and Cooper for the first receiver to go in the draft. His size and athleticism is nearly unmatched in this draft, running a 4.35 in the forty at the Combine despite standing 6’3” and weighing 215 pounds. He is a rare athletic specimen with the size, speed, and strength to dominate at all levels of the field.

This isn’t to say that athleticism is the only reason he’s likely to be a top ten pick. There are a couple other players lower on this list who can come close to matching his gifts, but neither of them boasts White’s ability or production. He has spectacular hands, and he does a great job winning contested balls in the air. He can leap for the ball and he can run after the catch, though he doesn’t do either as well as Parker.

White is still very raw, roughly on the same level as a route runner as Parker. He is stronger and doesn’t get shoved off his routes as easily, but he telegraphs where he’s going with a sharp lean whenever he runs a breaking route. He exploded onto the scene early last season, but by the end of the year he had come back to earth some, possibly because defenders were able to get a read on where he was going and what he was doing.

White is a fantastic athlete with some decent receiver skills, but there remain questions about whether or not he’ll be able to blend these talents to become a superstar receiver. His speed in the forty was stellar, but on the field he looked slower than both of the other top receivers in the draft. He can stop and change directions on a dime, but he hasn’t made much progress to developing as a route runner. Still, after only two years of major college football he is fairly well developed, and the slight risk of a bust isn’t enough in my mind to knock him out of the top half of the first round.

Dorial Green-Beckham – WR, Character Issues

Let’s get this out of the way. You may have noticed above that where I normally list a player’s school, for Green-Beckham I instead put “Character Issues”. This was partly a joke, partly because I really don’t know what school to put for him. He spent two years at Missouri before being kicked off the team for various off the field transgressions. His final year he spent enrolled at Oklahoma, forced to sit out due to the idiotic NCAA transfer rules. It’s less clear what happened there, but there have been some rumors that he decided to declare early for the draft after failing to get along with the coaching staff. True or not, it’s clear that there are some serious off the field concerns with Green-Beckham, concerns teams have to convince themselves to overlook if they are going to draft him.

But once you start watching him on the football field, it is disturbingly easy to forget about all the other stuff. He is truly a rare specimen, Devante Parker with two extra inches and thirty extra pounds. He can race past defenders to beat them deep. He can leap to pluck balls from heights no other players on the field can reach. He can overpower tacklers, catching the ball and racing for yards after the catch. He is an absolute athletic freak, and had he followed a normal college path he would be in the conversation as a top five pick.

There are issues with Green-Beckham that extend beyond the off the field stuff. As large as he is, he is a bit inconsistent at going outside his frame to make difficult catches. He isn’t particularly fluid as an athlete, posting miserable numbers in both his shuttle drills at the combine. This translates to his underdeveloped route running. At Missouri he ran almost exclusively vertical routes, though if he’d been able to play last season his role likely would have expanded. Taking Green-Beckham is a major risk. But it also carries incredible upside, a potential All Pro receiver to be found in the latter half of the first round.

Jaelen Strong – WR, Arizona State

There is no way to avoid a pun using his name, so I’m just going to get it out of the way: Strong is the strongest receiver in the draft. He is huge, 6’2” tall and weighing 217 pounds, and he looks even bigger on the field. It’s a nightmare trying to bring him down once he has the ball in his hands. He pushes around smaller players with no trouble, and it is pretty much impossible to knock him off his route.

What really boosts Strong up in the draft is his ability at the point of the catch. He doesn’t high point the ball as well as several of the other receivers, but he does a very good job using his body to shield defenders from the ball. His hands are as strong as the rest of his body, and the ball sticks in them like a steel trap. As long as the throw comes out with good timing, he is virtually unstoppable on back shoulder passes.

Strong can win catches without the need for separation, a good thing since he rarely creates a great deal of separation. His routes are consistently ugly, and at times he looks like he’s almost jogging, though it’s hard to say whether this is an issue of effort or if he’s just slow. He ran a 4.44 forty at the combine, but he never showed that kind of speed on the field.

Strong has a lot of downsides, and there is a significant risk that he could turn out to be a bust. He isn’t going to create consistent separation as a route runner, and he isn’t going to threaten defenses over the top. But if he can end up in the right situation, with a coach and a quarterback who trust him, he can become a nightmare to defend, working the sidelines and slowly beating a defense to death. He is a significant step beneath the top receivers, but he is still probably worth a first round pick.

Breshad Perriman

There is a lot to like about Perriman. He’s big, standing 6’2” and weighing 212 pounds. He’s fast, reportedly clocked at 4.26 in the forty at his pro day. This speed shows up on the field as well, where he was one of the most dangerous playmakers in college football last year. Perriman is one of the premier physical talents in this year’s draft, but when you watch him on film it becomes difficult to ignore the fact that he still isn’t very good as a receiver.

The little things are what really hold Perriman back. He is a dreadful route runner, failing to sell his fakes and leaning so sharply to one side or the other that he might as well just tell the defender what route he’s going to run at the line. Any NFL cornerback will have no trouble knowing where he’s going, and the only question from there will be whether his speed can beat them to that point.

He is decently strong at the point of the catch, but he should be better than he is at winning contested balls. He times his jumps terribly, and he doesn’t track the ball particularly well. In addition, he has a bad habit of dropping the football. Last season he dropped 13 percent of the catchable passes sent his way, a consistent flaw that will hold him back until he gets it fixed.

There are a lot of concerns with Perriman, but we are far enough from his last appearance on the field that it can become easy to dismiss them. Everything he struggles with can be corrected with good coaching, and every NFL coach believes they are a good coach. If he can harness his athleticism, he can be a dominant, nearly unstoppable receiver who can consistently stretch the field. This is appealing enough that I could understand a high upside gamble at the end of the first round, but I think he is much more suited to going in the middle of the second.

Maxx Williams – TE, Minnesota

 

If you’re looking for a prototypical tight end in this draft, Williams is your best option. He was the best tight end in college football last season, and the only reason he didn’t bring home the Mackey Award was the truly awful quarterback play he had to endure. Minnesota could not throw the ball at all last season, and they understood this, calling a very run heavy attack that limited Williams’s opportunities to show himself off as a receiver.

Williams spent most of his time last season as a run blocker. This isn’t a strength of his, but it isn’t exactly a weakness either. He doesn’t overpower defenders at the point of attack, but he does a good job engaging with his hands and sealing off a hole. He needs to improve his footwork to keep players from getting around him in space, and he sometimes gets overaggressive and misses a block. But he has the ability to be a functional player in the running game, with the potential to be much more than that as he develops strength and technique.

The real strength of his game is as a receiver. He is merely average as an athlete, not particularly quick but with good lower body explosion. Linebackers and safeties will probably be able to keep up with him when he runs down the field, but he is a good enough route runner that he can create separation for himself. His hands are absurd, regularly plucking balls out of spots he has no business reaching, and he offers value as a run after the catch threat.

Tight end is weak in this year’s class, and for that reason I could see Williams making it up into the first round. That wouldn’t be a huge stretch, but I think it’s more appropriate for him to go somewhere in the early second. Teams that miss out on him will have no choice but to hope to find a solution somewhere farther down the draft, or to gamble on a versatile player like the next one on the list.

Devin Funchess – WR/TE, Michigan

Funchess is another boom or bust prospect. Large and athletic, he is capable of playing either wide receiver or tight end at the next level, though he has a lot of work to do if he wants to succeed at either position. The upside for him is a player who can dominate on the outside thanks to his size or on the inside thanks to his speed. The downside is a poorly polished football player who doesn’t really have the skills or the consistency to fit in any NFL system.

In his last season at Michigan, Funchess switched into a full time receiver role after playing primarily tight end through his first two years. His production was never what people expected, but no part of the Michigan program lived up to expectations over the past three years. Funchess did show promise with some of his receiver skills, smart recognition settling into zones and decent route running ability for a receiver his size.

But he also struggled with consistency. At times he was incapable of creating separation when matched up against cornerbacks, and he didn’t win contested balls as often as someone of his size should. He is capable of spectacular catches, but he also drops a lot of easy passes. The best way to describe his blocking would be “indifferent”, which doesn’t bold well for a transition back to tight end.

I genuinely don’t know where I’d rather see Funchess play in the NFL. I like my tight ends to block, but I also like my receivers to be able to create some separation against cornerbacks. He might find his most use as a slot receiver, in the mold of someone like Jordan Matthews or Jimmy Graham. If everything works out well, he can be a very useful, if not dominant, offensive weapon, the sort of player who would provide good value somewhere in the second round.

Devin Smith – WR, Ohio State

Smith is an interesting prospect. All the conversation after Ohio State’s title run was about how Cardale Jones had improved his draft stock, but Smith did almost as much to help push himself up the board. Prior to this run he was considered a midround prospect, but now, even after some of the dust has settled, there are people who have him pegged as a player who could go in the late first round. This is a stretch in my mind, for a player who does a couple things very well but is still extremely one dimensional.

Smith is at his best as a deep ball receiver. In fact, it could be argued he’s the best deep ball receiver in the draft, better even than the significantly taller Parker and Green-Beckham. He has phenomenal straightline speed, and he makes subtle moves on his vertical routes to create separation and to give himself space along the sideline. Despite being only 6’0”, he is fantastic at jump balls, timing his leaps perfectly and snatching the ball out of the air with incredibly strong hands.

Throughout his time at Ohio State, Smith was always a dangerous deep threat who never fulfilled his potential to develop into a more complete player. His over the top speed can provide easy separation on underneath routes against cautious cornerbacks, and he shows good understanding to settle into zones across the middle when the play breaks down. But he is still a receiver who never had more than 44 catches in a season. He is a one trick pony—a hell of a trick, mind you—and I could never see spending a first round pick on a player who is only going to contribute two or three times a game.