A look at the most productive college players on the offensive side of the ball who will be taking their talents to the NFL Draft.
Positive draft evaluations seem to boil down into two basic schools of thought. Either you’re a player who has the potential to produce highly once you reach the NFL, or you’re a player that already has a resume of high production heading into the pros.
An example of the former would be a player like Utah State quarterback Jordan Love. Love showed worlds of athletic potential on tape, has the prototypical height and weight of a “poster child franchise quarterback” and had a solid NFL Combine to really seal the deal. He’s a player coming into the draft with potential, but one look at Love’s struggling stat sheet from his final college year will show that potential is most of all he has at this point in his career.
Contrast Love with someone like Oklahoma’s Jalen Hurts. Hurts isn’t coming into the draft with Love’s prototypical size and skillset, but he’s bringing with him a mountain of college production from last year alone. The Hurts’ type players are more in the camp where you know what kind of player you’re getting, coaches are just trying to replicate that on the next level.
There are merits to both kinds of prospects, and of course, worlds of cautionary tales for drafting based on potential or production alone. But today, I want to shed a bit of light on some of those strong “production” players from the college level.
Think of this as sort of an ‘extraordinarily late All-American’ college team, with the most productive draft-eligible players from 2019 making up the list.