The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are believed to have drafted a steal in the seventh-round of the NFL draft. Wide receiver Tez Johnson was widely believed to be a much bigger talent than where he was drafted. However, something out of his control caused him to drop all the way to the final round of the draft.
Johnson is explosive and elusive. He led the nation in yards after catch over the last few years and is a very good return man. So what caused this dynamic playmaker to fall so far in the NFL draft?
Sometimes when there is an elephant in the room all you can do is address it. Johnson has a massive elephant that needs to be addressed. That elephant: Johnson is extremely small by NFL standards.
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Johnson measured in at 5’9 at the NFL combine. That’s small, but not unusually small for his position. What has teams scared away is the fact that he weighed in at just 156 lbs. This is the 0.7th percentile of all receivers who have entered the draft. That’s right, 0.7th percentile.
So in the spirit of addressing this elephant, I wanted to give some perspective to exactly how small that is.
Desmond Watson signed with the Bucs as an undrafted free agent out of Florida. The big nose tackle gained a lot of attention at his pro day when he weighed in at 467 lbs. That’s huge, even by NFL standards.
This means that Buccaneers acquired the largest player in the NFL draft, as well as the smallest. The difference between them? You would need three Tez Johnson’s to balance the scales with Watson and they would still tilt in Watsons favor.
Okay, comparing Johnson to a nose tackle isn’t really fair. A more apples to apples comparison would be comparing him to another wide receiver. Let’s try stacking him up against his teammate Mike Evans.
Evans weighed in at 231 lbs and measured 6’4 at the NFL combine back in 2014. That’s more than a half a foot difference between him and Johnson. Even more shocking, Evans weighed a whopping 75 lbs more than his fellow wide receiver does now.
That’s two football players who play the same position. But let’s put it in more day to day terms. Let’s compare Johnson to a regular person.
I am a 35 year old man. We don’t have to go into the details of my weight, but it would take about two Tez Johnson’s to equal one me. Needless to say, he’s much smaller than the average man.
So let’s not compare him to an average man. Instead, I’ll compare him to someone else in my family.
I have a six year old son at home. He’s big for his age group, but keep in mind that he’s just a kindergartner. He weighs about 70 lbs.
That is to say that Johnson weighs about 15 lbs more than two big kindergartners combined. Bringing it full circle, that means he’s a lot closer to being the size of a six year old than he is to the size of his new Buccaneers teammate Desmond Watson.
Please know that I’m not saying any of this to poke fun at Johnson’s size. The fact of the matter is that he’s unusually small for an NFL player. There’s no getting around that fact.
It’s also a fact that this is a great player. He dominated the two major college football conferences and earned his place in the NFL. Johnson is extremely small, but the only thing that seems to be smaller is how much that matters on the football field.
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