Every scouting combine has an athletic superstar, and there’s no question who the superstar has been in 2019: Ole Miss receiver D.K. Metcalf. When you run a 4.33-second 40-yard dash at 6’3” and 228 pounds, and add 27 bench-press reps, a vertical leap of 40.5 inches, you’re going to get a lot of attention. When you do it all as rocked up as this, the attention is going to multiply:
Metcalf also set a combine record with a preposterous wingspan of 82 7/8 inches. Clearly, he’s an absolute athletic freak. NFL executives have already taken notice; Raiders head coach and Big Kahuna Jon Gruden brought Metcalf up specifically earlier this week, when asked about cornerbacks need to tackle.
“We had a guy walk in our room last night, a receiver out of Ole Miss, his name is Metcalf… I mean he looked like Jim Brown,” Gruden said on Wednesday. “He’s the biggest wideout I’ve ever seen. You have to ask yourself, who is tackling this guy? So, if you’re a 175-pound corner and you’re tackling a 235-pound back or a 230-pound wide out or a tight end, you have to ask yourself, is this what I want to do? You have to find guys that can tackle big time. I think sometimes that is overlooked.”
Comparing Metcalf to other combine freak receivers like Calvin Johnson and Julio Jones is one thing when assessing how prospects dominate the drills. But how does this all transfer to the field? Once Metcalf fades from social media and NFL personnel are back to watching his tape, how can Metcalf take all that twitched-up muscle and make it work in game situations?
Through his three years at Ole Miss, Metcalf caught 67 balls for 1,228 yards and 14 touchdowns. He played in just seven games last season due to a neck injury, catching 26 passes for 569 yards and five scores. You project that out over a full season and it looks pretty good—certainly Metcalf’s 21.9 yards-per-catch average in 2018 speaks to how he can light things up downfield.
We saw this in Ole Miss’ first play against Alabama in September when he torched cornerback Saivion Smith on a vertical route. This is just pure speed and wingspan to bring in the pass from quarterback Jordan Ta’amu, and this is where Metcalf looks the part of the “X” receiver at the NFL level—the guy no cornerback wants to deal with at the second and third levels.
“Anytime I got a smaller corner, I’m going to use that to my advantage to get him,” Metcalf said this week. “Use my big body to go up and make them help me make the contested catch.”
Contested-catch receivers talk about “50-50” balls in which there’s half a chance they’re going to get the completion even when a defender is draped all over them. Metcalf joked about “99-1” balls in which “The one percent I’m not coming down with it, it may be a bad [throw] by the quarterback.”
On this incompletion, however, Metcalf shows less of a plan downfield, and this is something that happens too often with him. Though he’s more than athletic enough to beat defenders with those gifts, smarter guys who understand how to get inside position will vex him until he learns to body his way through that kind of obstruction.
And on this comeback, Metcalf isn’t as aware as he needs to be of where he is on the field, stepping out of bounds to negate any potential catch. What you have to like here, though, is his ability to get away from the coverage. Though he tested far less impressively in the 20-yard shuttle and the three-cone drill than in other drills–leading some to believe that he’s just a straight-line speed guy–Metcalf does show potential for more elevated route concepts when he gets more reps that way.
This is a run play where Metcalf obviously doesn’t get the ball, but watch how he sells the outside move to the slant, placing himself to make a quick catch and burn upfield. In situations like this, especially against zone defenses, it’s easy to imagine how he can dominate as a yards-after-catch receiver.
As NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein wrote in his scouting report of Metcalf, the receiver “rushes through pattern ingredients rather than developing their flavors as a route chef.” In the context of his current development, Metcalf could be compared to the first-time bachelor that can only manage spaghetti out of the can and mac-and-cheese out of the box. But over time, and with a little seasoning (get it?), Metcalf could very well become the kind of uncoverable receiver Calvin Johnson was and Julio Jones is.
It will take the right team to fill out his freakish raw skills with a lot of Receiver 101.
