A dude not taken: JJ Arcega-Whiteside

Oct 19, 2018, 12:16 PM

For those who don't know, this is JJ Arcega-Whiteside:
https://gostanford.com/roster.aspx?rp_id=13960

We didn't take him in 2015. Arcega plays the 9, or boundary spot - he's a huge 6'3", 225-pound guy - and we already had Shadell Bell on board. (This was a rare example of a "miss" from Jeff Scott, actually...Bell moved to TE and ultimately transferred out after making almost no contribution.) But the problem here was, we had a couple of packaged 5-stars on the hook, Deon Cain and Ray-Ray McCloud. We got 'em, and we were full, with 2 players (Bell and Cain) who projected at the same spot as Arcega-Whiteside.

So there was no spot for the 5.7, high-end-3-star-rated Dorman product per Rivals.com. Stanford swooped in from across the country and pounced, and he's now the leading receiver for arguably the best team in the Pac-12. He leads (by a mile, actually) the Cardinal with 37 catches for 632 yards (an impressive 17.1 yards per grab) with 9 TD's. That's through 7 games. If he replicates that over the second half of the season (assuming the Cardinal get the Pac-12 Championship game and a bowl game, which seems likely), that projects to a massive 74 grabs for 1264 and 18 TD's, which is Mike Williams-level production.

The NFL has noticed. Arcega-Whiteside has gotten at least one first-round projection from some draftniks (though most seem to regard him as a Day 2 or even Day 3 prospect owing to his lack of truly elite speed).

The dude can play, whatever.

This in turn begs the fascinating question: despite the fact that we unquestionably missed on Bell, if we play the "what if" game, would Whiteside have really excelled at Clemson? Well, maybe...but maybe not. Cain and McCloud were definitely often-frustrating players for us but they were explosive...Cain had a pair of massive game-changing catch-and-runs (against FSU in 2015 that broke the game, and another in 2016 in the national title game against Bama that sparked our comeback); those were pivotal, monster games for Clemson (you can argue two of the most important three games Clemson has ever played, actually) and we simply may not have won those games without Cain. And again...Whiteside was a pure 9 and wouldn't have beat out Williams...and while we didn't get quite as much out of Cain as we might have wanted, there's no question he's more electric and more dynamic, if not quite as adept at going up and getting it as Whiteside is.

And then there's the youngsters. Tee Higgins and Justyn Ross both are far more explosive and faster than Whiteside...and Diondre Overton - who may be our best pure Red Zone receiver - is even bigger. Would there have been room for Arcega-Whiteside at the boundary spot at Clemson, or would he have been crowded out by more physically talented players and never gotten the opportunity he now has at Stanford?

Possible. Perhaps even likely. There's only one football.

Stuff sometimes, it seems, works out like it's supposed to. But it's still fascinating that for all our recent success getting receivers out of the state in general and Dorman HS in particular, there might have been a first-rounder that got away...and it didn't even cause a hiccup in the NFL pipeline for Wide Receiver U.

That is what's called an "Uptown Problem", folks.

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