The NFL Hates Jets Receivers

With Quincy Enunwa out for the year the New York Jets are left with twelve wide receivers on the 90 man roster. Two are rookie mid round draft picks: 2017 third round pick Ardarius Stewart and fourth round pick Chad Hansen.  Two more are former seventh round picks: Charone Peake and Marquess Wilson. The remaining eight receivers on the Jets roster are former undrafted free agents.

Think about that for just a second. Eight of the Jets receivers were not considered worthy of even a seventh round pick by every team in the NFL when they came out of college. Two more were passed up for more than 230 selections before being chosen in the seventh and last round. The only two receivers on the Jets who were ever considered by any NFL team to be worth more than a seventh round flier are both rookies who have missed most of their preseason to date with injuries. Though they may have bright futures, to expect mid round picks who miss much of their practice time to be productive NFL receivers in their rookie years is probably a bridge too far.

The remaining 10 receivers are players who it is fair to say got uniformly mediocre to poor evaluations, based on their respective draft positions or lack thereof, by the entire NFL when they were coming out of college. Of course NFL production trumps draft evaluations, and there are plenty of undrafted free agents who have gone on to become very good NFL players. Unfortunately for the Jets most of the remaining non-rookie receivers have already tried and failed with one or more NFL teams. They now have a track record, and up until now it largely reflects the NFL's draft evaluations of them. Robby Anderson is the notable exception, but other than Anderson and the 2017 draft picks this is a collection of wide receivers it is fair to say the entire NFL is uniformly unimpressed with.

Professional athletes often use a trumped up, often largely bogus sense of the entire world disrespecting them to psyche themselves up for top performance. Even the best teams in sports are often heard proclaiming to anyone who will listen how it's "us against the world." In most cases this is a convenient fiction which serves as an effective motivational tool. In the case of the Jets receivers there is no fiction. The NFL really does for the most part hate them all. Let's hope that very real hate can be used as an effective motivational tool for this motley crew to achieve heights of which nobody believes them capable.