This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Joining me today is my good friend Nate Tyson. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing great. What's kind of nice right now is I just get the focus on the draft stuff right now. And then meanwhile, you have to do podcasts about trades and contracts and the makings of the league and where the NFL is going. And it's great because this is like the time I just go, just watching college prospects, man. Yeah, I'll talk to you in May.

I'm playing big time catch up here. These are guys you've all watched. I'm kind of cramming them in now,

which I always knew what's going to happen. But it's funny because I talked to a few different

coaches today. And they're all doing this. This is what they're doing all day now. So it's interesting to be on that timeline and be able to talk to those guys as they're watching these people. So it's been illuminating. And today we're going to do the past catchers. We're not going to do all the positions in the lead up to the draft. I think we're going to do some of the more important ones, some of the stacked ones, and the past catchers is another really good group.

Not only does it have the depth that a group like last year did, but it's top heavy, too.

I mean, you have guys like Jamar Chase that could go in the top five.

Devante Smith won the Heisman trophy, and there was a guy on his team that some people think might be better than him.

Yeah.

I mean, it is a truly incredible class and a really interesting group of guys.

So I wanted to dig into that.

But before we get to the specific players, and we're going to mention Kyle Pitts along with

the receivers, by the way, because the tight end group is not very good based on everything

I've

heard. So we're just knocking out two birds with one stone here. So before we do that, though,

I want to talk about that depth and that question. Because I think along with digging into these

guys specifically, I want to talk about why this might be the case, where it seems like every single year we're having this, oh, this is the deepest group of receivers ever. Look at all, you can get a guy in the third round. And, you know, I asked a round today because I don't want to just parrot that if it's not true. I don't want to, that's not going to continue to be the case going forward. So I asked a lot of people if they thought that would just be the case Pretty much every year based on everything they've heard

And the guys they've watched. And the consensus seems to be yes. This is not just a blipping talent. This is an indication of where the sport is headed. And I actually wrote a big story about this for the ring in the last year before the draft. And to a lot of different people including coaches at lower levels on a u t or seven on seven teams regional teams college coaches i talked to clemsons receivers coach talked to josh gattis who's the offensive coordinator at michigan who coached jerry judy and ch Chris Godwin and some of these guys.

And there really does seem to be a consensus that guys are just coming along more comfortable

at the position with a more nuanced understanding of the position.

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