Brock Bowers has felt known and yet also like an enigma of this draft cycle. A star player on back-to-back national championship-winning Georgia teams who skipped the NFL combine and then Georgia’s pro day, Bowers is now in the thick of silly season where one simple photograph with Rob Gronkowski has people second-guessing their initial feelings and his draft status. Is he actually built like a tight end? Is it worth taking a tight end that high? Did you see his outfit?
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I keep going back to the term “offensive weapon” for Bowers. While the Jaguars, of course, put some stench on that term after designating Denard Robinson as an “Offensive Weapon” on their roster about a decade ago, but with Bowers and what he unlocks for an entire offense, the term is just too fitting to not use.
Why Brock Bowers is worthy of the hype
Bowers does not have the stereotypical build for an NFL tight end, measuring at 6 feet, 3 1/8 inches and 243 pounds at the combine (though with a 32 3/4-inch arm length that helps ease some concerns), but once you move past the initial shock and expectations of what you would typically picture with an elite tight end prospect and instead picture an elite football player, it only takes a couple of plays to see exactly why Bowers is so highly regarded:
The thing that stands out the most when watching Bowers is how he got the ball seemingly all over the field and in every type of way. And it seemed like that because that was exactly how Bowers was used in Athens.
Only 44.7% of Bowers’ snaps were from what PFF categorizes as a tight end alignment, which would rank 168th out of 191 qualifying college tight ends, and far lower than other prospects that were categorized as “receiving-first” when entering the NFL. Kyles Pitts aligned as a tight end on 62.9% of his snaps, Dalton Kincaid on 64.5% at Utah and Sam LaPorta on 67% at Iowa (which makes sense given their recent offensive philosophy of…
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Author : Yahoo Sports
Publish date : 2024-03-21 01:27:37
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