#078. TE Michael Egnew, Missouri – Thumbs Up
I feel like a zombie fan giving all these thumbs up. Jeff Ireland started this draft with an unprecedented streak of picks that I actually kind of liked. It had to happen eventually.
Let me get the bad out of the way first. Egnew is a Missouri tight end, and the production of all Missouri tight ends should be viewed skeptically because of the system. Chase Coffman and Martin Rucker were supposed to be extremely savvy pass catchers coming out of that system, and they haven’t produced **** at the next level. Mizzou plays their tight ends like receivers and throws a lot of screen passes at them to try and take advantage of size mismatches. Also, Michael Egnew did not block at Missouri, pretty much at all. Even his blocks in space generally sucked. I can’t vouch for his blocking at the Senior Bowl as I wasn’t present for practices. His Combine drills were maddening because I knew he was capable of so much more. He almost willfully disobeyed coaches yelling at him to run his gauntlet faster as he jogged it the whole way. His routes lacked an edge and to be 100 percent honest I thought the much more obscure H-Back from Northwestern, Drake Dunsmore, showed him up in the tight end receiving drills.
All that said, he was still the number three tight end on my board months ago, at a time when everyone was still fawning over Orson Charles to go along with Coby Fleener and Dwayne Allen. As much as I loved Chase Ford of Miami, I did not have Chase above Michael Egnew. You are not drafting Michael because of inflated production. I mentioned Chase Coffman and Martin Rucker, but they were really average athletes with no explosiveness. Michael Egnew tied the Combine position record held by Dustin Keller with a 10’11” broad jump. I love that he decided at his pro day that wasn’t good enough, and re-did the measure turning in an unheard of 11’3” broad jump to go along with a 37.5 inch vertical. The best broad jump I have ever seen at any position was Calvin Johnson’s 11’7” broad jump in 2007. I think some obscure guy might have broken that record this year, but I’m not counting it unless he plays some NFL football.
Egnew ran a 4.62 second “official” 40 yard dash at the Combine, but my re-timing actually came in at a stunning 4.48 seconds. I have explained this before, but I re-measure Combine 40 times because the “official” times suck and very literally no team in t he NFL uses them. Every team requires their own scouts to time the 40 yard dashes themselves and so I do the same, except I use HD video feeds to take my own sucky thumb reaction out of the equation. I measure from the time the player’s back foot leaves the ground to the time he runs across the finish, which means I am very literally measuring the exact time it takes for every player to step across 40 yards of distance. About 90 percent of the time, what I get is within one or two hundredths of a second of the NFL Network’s live unofficial time, which shows me that I’m on the right track.
So think about all that, a 6’5” and 250+ lbs man that broad jumps a little shy of what Calvin Johnson did and runs a 4.48 second 40 yard dash, can leap 37.5 inches vertically. Change Michael Egnew’s name to Thomas Thomasson and make him from Trinity College and he still would be drafted. You could not have said the same about Chase Coffman or Michael Rucker.
Sometimes I feel like people have the wrong idea about what a true “seam threat” is as it relates to the tight end position. Speed alone doesn’t cut it. If that were the case, slide Clyde Gates in to a tight end position and voila, you have a seam threat to be a mismatch on linebackers. Good luck with that. A seam threat has to be tall because he has to be able to go up for footballs that are dropped right in the hole between the safety and linebacker coverage. That is a challenging area for a quarterback to throw into, and the smaller your tight end, the smaller the window the quarterback has to get the ball into an already-challenging area. Michael Egnew is the model of a true seam threat because he’s over 6’5” tall and regularly makes catches in traffic, in addition to his speed, explosiveness and body control. While I am not sure I agree with the Dolphins about his run after catch ability, particularly as it relates to physicality and breaking tackles (Rob Gronkowski being the model), he does have a blessed combination of size and athletic ability that should make him at least average in this regard.
In addition to working the seam, I really like his lower body explosion for more dexterous routes usually reserved for slot receivers, like jerk routes and arrow routes. There is one particular touchdown against Kansas State that you usually find included in highlight reels of Egnew that for me encapsulates his potential. He used that great lower body strength and explosion to get open on an underneath jerk route, then after the catch he plants one foot in the ground and explodes up the field to run into the end zone. If he can do that in Miami, plus make tough catches up the seam and be a threat on fade passes in the end zone as he was at Missouri, he will have a nice career.
