2019 NFL Draft Receiver Class | Deep Dive

The following is a special to NFL Draft Geek as former writer/analyst Kyle Howe has spend the pre-draft process breaking down the 2019 NFL Draft Receiver class. Listed below are his rankings which also include player comparisons along with his explanations.

Explanations

For years I grew up watching the likes of Charles Rogers, Mike Williams and Roy Williams bomb out of Detroit, and eventually the league, as my Detroit Lions couldn’t manage to draft a receiver to save the franchise, or their life (until Calvin Johnson). As I sat through the misery it ultimately piqued my interest in the NFL Draft, mostly because I wondered how we could always pick the ‘wrong’ guy. As I later realized through my years of draft work there is no perfect formula for predicting a player’s success at the next level. But there has to be a better way than just the eye test, right? That’s what I’m looking to accomplish.

The wide receiver position relies on athleticism as much as any other position in football. When looking at some of the game’s most recent elites: Calvin Johnson, Julio Jones, Mike Evans and Odell Beckham, they all had exceptional athletic profiles. Because of this I wanted to somehow use their Combine/Pro Day testing as one of the final evaluating factors. Relative Athletic Scores (relativeathleticscores.com), do an exceptional job of capturing a prospect’s true athletic profile and how they stack up compared to the rest of their class. But grading a prospect on their Relative Athletic Score alone isn’t enough, so I considered what else should go into my grading criteria for wide receiver and came up with eight different categories I would grade each prospect on 1-10 (1 being lowest, 10 being highest). By using an average of those eight scores I could come up with a final ‘visual’ grade to then be averaged out with their Relative Athletic Score for overall grade. The eight categories I graded wide receivers on were: Hands, Route Running, Speed/Separation, Agility/Quickness, Release, Leaping Ability, Size/Strength, and Football IQ.

(Example: Terry McLaurin – Hands: 9, Route Running: 10, Speed/Separation: 10, Agility/Quickness: 10, Release: 7, Leaping Ability: 5, Size/Strength: 4, Football IQ: 9 – Visual Score: 7.88, RAS: 9.53, Overall Grade: 8.71)

*Prospects who did not participate in Combine or Pro Day only received a visual grade and an ‘Incomplete’ overall grade. These prospects were still ranked according to tape and their visual score should correlate with draft position.

Grading System

So what does this ‘overall grade’ mean in terms of draft position? The table below lists the grades and what pick each grade correlates with:

With anything data-driven there is bound to be at least one outlier, and these rankings are no different. There were a few prospects whose visual grade was not even within 3 to 4 points of their RAS, while several others saw visual grades 2 to 3 points higher than their RAS. These are the prospects one should consider to be outliers, and it’s what makes a prospect Antonio Brown, or Stephen Hill. In a hardball, results-driven environment that is the NFL, talent evaluators would go back to the drawing board in such cases to re-evaluate such discrepancies. In this case though, the rankings are left as is after the final visual and RAS scores have been calculated, however I would argue the visual score is the more important of the two and should be relied on most heavily in the overall evaluation process (assuming one has the eye to evaluate talent). While this will be it for this year I hope to look back on the success of this grading system and utilize it in a similar way to evaluate other positions down the road. Stay tuned.