The only player among the 16 who’s clearly lived up to or exceeded expectations has been Darrell Jackson, a third-round pick by Seattle in 2000 who played sparingly last year with the Broncos. He’s hauled in passes worth 7,132 passes and 51 TDs – the highest marks by any Florida receiver in the NFL since Wes Chandler (a first-round pick in 1978) burned up pro football defenses in the late 1970s and 1980s (559 catches, 8,966 yards, 56 TDs).
Ike Hilliard certainly had a respectable career. His 546 catches put him among the Top 80 in all of NFL history. And at 33 years old and still fairly productive last year with Tampa, the free agent should be able to contribute somewhere over the next couple of years. But he’s scored just 35 TDs in a 12-year career and has never reached a Pro Bowl.
The Giants certainly had much higher hopes for Hilliard when they made him the 7th overall pick in the 1997 draft.
In fact, Hilliard and his Gators teammate Reidel Anthony stand as the poster children for the futility of Florida wideouts in the NFL.
The spectacular college receivers led the 1996 Gators to the school’s first national title and were largely responsible for the fact that Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel won the Heisman Trophy that season.
The 1996 Gators were virtually unstoppable on offense, averaging 46.6 PPG, led by the explosive Anthony and Hilliard. They combined for 119 catches, 2,193 yards and 28 TDs that season.
The NFL was so smitten by these two Florida receivers that both were snapped up within the first 16 picks of the 1997 draft.
To say they crashed and burned in the NFL would overstate the case. But there’s no doubt that they both failed to live up to the expectations they had forged for themselves as leaders of arguably college football’s most spectacular offense of the 1990s.
Those 1996 Gators were so talented that two of their back-up receivers were also high draft picks: Jacquez Green was taken in the second round of the 1998 draft. Travis McGriff was grabbed in the third round of the 1999 draft. Neither made much of a dent in the NFL, as the chart above indicates.
More recent drafts have been just as bad. New England grabbed athletically gifted Florida wide receiver Chad Jackson in the second round of the 2006 draft, the most recent in a growing list of bad picks by the Patriots. You need only four letters to describe Jackson's career: B-U-S-T.
Florida receiver Andre Caldwell was grabbed in the third round of last year's draft by the Bengals. He showed signs of life late in the season after recovering from a nagging foot injury. He may yet to prove to be a big-time NFL receiver. But his inauspicious start is typical of Florida wide receivers. Andre's older brother Reche, meanwhile, was a second-round pick in the 2002 draft. He scored just 11 TDs in a six-year career with three different teams.
Florida has prodced big-time NFL players at other positions over the past two decades, mostly only defense (Jevon Kearse, Alex Brown, Lito Sheppard).
But the long, long list of busts and underachievers out of the same school at the same position reeks of a systemic problem. To put it another way: Florida receivers are simply not as good as they seem when they're burning up SEC defenses. Florida receivers are consistently paired with top college quarterbacks, for example. They also play on teams filled by blue-chip performers at virtually every other position year after year. This cozy situations certainly help their production.
But perhaps the dual-threat Harvin is better than all of them. Maybe he turns into what teams expected when they devoted high picks to Ike Hilliard, Reidel Anthony or Travis Taylor.
We don't know what will happen when a team decides to roll the dice on Harvin later this month. But we do know this: Florida wideouts in the NFL are one of the biggest gambles in sports.
By Kerry J. Byrne
