The 2020 NFL Draft is just over a week away, and with the NFL season (at least) five months away, there’s not a whole lot to wager on (unless you’re into Madden sims, which no one is. Ok, maybe some people are).
At this point, a lot of value has been sucked out of the market for some of the marquee players like Henry Ruggs III and Isaiah Simmons. But for whatever reason, there is still some value in players who are a little more “under the radar.” One of those players is Jalen Reagor of TCU.
[Editor’s note: Check out PFF’s 2020 Mock Draft Hub, NFL Draft Big Board and NFL Mock Draft Simulator. PFF Elite subscribers can also download the 1,100-page 2020 NFL Draft Guide.]
Reagor is one of the more interesting prospects in the entire draft. In fact, our athleticism metric, which combines various combine metrics using principal component analysis and forecasts how this combination of new variables projects to PFF grades at the NFL level, has never given a receiver a better grade than it gave Reagor, and that includes Ruggs.
While Reagor was not very productive in 2019, catching fewer than 50% of his targets and generating just over 600 yards (with less than 150 yards after the catch), he dealt with some pretty poor play at the quarterback position and saw an unreal amount of uncatchable targets. He did drop seven of his 88 targets, which is a bit concerning. He also avoided only five tackles on his catches in 2019, down from 11 in 2018.
Our college-to-pro projection system — which is powered by the machine learning capabilities of AWS — likes him enough to give him statistical comps of former top-10 pick Corey Davis and 2019 breakout star D.J. Chark. His ceiling projection (90th percentile) is that of Chris Godwin, Julio Jones and Tyler Lockett, so the dreaded “potential” is there. He leads all receivers in our projections in yards per catch, and he is second (weirdly) in yards per carry, cementing him firmly as a first-round pick in our minds.
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