"FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- For the life of him, Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy can't grasp why rookie Patriots receiver Jakobi Meyers went undrafted. When reached for comment earlier this week, you could almost hear Nagy shaking his head.
"No, we've asked that internally a lot," he said. "Part of our process in getting better is to find out why the players we did invite (to the Senior Bowl) that didn't get drafted went undrafted. The feedback we've gotten from around the league was the 40 time. He ran in the 4.6 range (4.63 seconds, to be exact, at the NFL Scouting Combine). But when you study the player on tape, speed wasn't one of his overwhelming assets anyway. That really wasn't part of his game that would get you excited about him."
Meyers, a willowy 6-foot-2, 200-pounder who, just three summers ago, was competing for the starting quarterback job at North Carolina State (a competition won by Ryan Finley, now angling to back up Andy Dalton with the Bengals), has opened eyes at every turn in New England, be it in OTAs, at the start of training camp, in joint practices with both the Lions and Titans and, of course, in preseason games, where he leads the Patriots with 19 catches on 26 targets.
"He's done a great job, and he's taken advantage of his opportunities," said quarterback Tom Brady, himself working through his 20th NFL training camp. "I think that's really what we try to stress to anybody: The football doesn't care how old you are, whether you were drafted or not. The football doesn't care how much experience you have. It just knows, when I let that ball go, it's got to be in the hands of the guy who it's intended for. So, if that happens to be him, it's him. If it's Julian (Edelman), it's Julian. Whoever it is, it doesn't matter in football."
That's pretty heady stuff coming from a stickler like Brady, but it's further proof that Meyers has taken the right approach from Day 1, just like Brady did back in 2000 as a sixth-round pick. (You may have heard that story once or twice ...)"
continued at:
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap30...bi-meyers-leaving-undrafted-label-in-the-dust
"No, we've asked that internally a lot," he said. "Part of our process in getting better is to find out why the players we did invite (to the Senior Bowl) that didn't get drafted went undrafted. The feedback we've gotten from around the league was the 40 time. He ran in the 4.6 range (4.63 seconds, to be exact, at the NFL Scouting Combine). But when you study the player on tape, speed wasn't one of his overwhelming assets anyway. That really wasn't part of his game that would get you excited about him."
Meyers, a willowy 6-foot-2, 200-pounder who, just three summers ago, was competing for the starting quarterback job at North Carolina State (a competition won by Ryan Finley, now angling to back up Andy Dalton with the Bengals), has opened eyes at every turn in New England, be it in OTAs, at the start of training camp, in joint practices with both the Lions and Titans and, of course, in preseason games, where he leads the Patriots with 19 catches on 26 targets.
"He's done a great job, and he's taken advantage of his opportunities," said quarterback Tom Brady, himself working through his 20th NFL training camp. "I think that's really what we try to stress to anybody: The football doesn't care how old you are, whether you were drafted or not. The football doesn't care how much experience you have. It just knows, when I let that ball go, it's got to be in the hands of the guy who it's intended for. So, if that happens to be him, it's him. If it's Julian (Edelman), it's Julian. Whoever it is, it doesn't matter in football."
That's pretty heady stuff coming from a stickler like Brady, but it's further proof that Meyers has taken the right approach from Day 1, just like Brady did back in 2000 as a sixth-round pick. (You may have heard that story once or twice ...)"
continued at:
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap30...bi-meyers-leaving-undrafted-label-in-the-dust
