Position Overview: Wide Receiver

Kobay White is the only Boston College wide receiver to record 500+ receiving yards in a season (2018) since Alex Amidon cleared the 1,000-yard mark for the second straight year in 2013. Put simply, over the course of Steve Addazio’s final six seasons as BC’s head coach, throwing the ball to perimeter playmakers was not a priority.

Loaded up in 12 personnel (one running back, two tight ends, and two wide receivers), the Eagles were devoted to pounding the rock. Again and again.

And when they did opt to pass, usually via play-action, the ball frequently went to one of BC’s several tight ends. Because of the program’s tight end depth and influx of talented O-Linemen and tailbacks, the scheme worked better than it probably should have.

Last year, the Eagles ran the ball against 8+ defenders in the box 47% of the time, more than any other team in the Power Five, according to ESPN college football writer David Hale. In the process, BC still averaged 3.52 yards per carry—that’s more than 13 programs (including Pittsburgh, Purdue, and West Virginia) averaged on the ground, period, in 2019.

With Jeff Hafley at the helm and offensive coordinator Frank Cignetti Jr. in the building, the Eagles’ offense will look quite different in 2020. By incorporating NFL wrinkles and the best of the high school and college game, BC’s offense should be better suited for wideout production.

Projected Depth Chart: Kobay White, Zay Flowers, Ethon Williams/Jaelen Gill, CJ Lewis/Taji Johnson

Biggest Questions:

Will the position group play more of a role in BC’s offense than in years past?

Tight end Hunter Long led the Eagles in receiving last year with 509 yards. It wasn’t the first time in the Addazio era that a tight end headlined the receiving department. In fact, Tommy Sweeney put up similar numbers in 2017 when the future Buffalo Bills seventh round pick hauled in 36 balls for a team-best 512 yards. The following year, Sweeney ranked second on the team in receptions (32) and third in yards (348).

In addition to Long, two other Eagles tight ends—Jake Burt and Korab Idrizi—also tallied 14+ catches in 2019. All in all, three of BC’s top-six receivers last year were tight ends. In a run-oriented offense that was dependent on the play-fake and/or quarterback rollouts for chunk yards in the passing game, wide receivers frequently took a secondary role, particularly on 1st and 2nd Down.

But with Burt, Idrizi, and Chris Garrison all graduating in May, there are plenty of touches to go around this season. And although Cignetti made it clear to reporters this week that BC won’t be abandoning power football, he did emphasize that he wants “to be able to play wide open and put guys in a position to be successful.”

Luckily for the longtime NFL assistant, the Eagles might have their best wide receiver corps in years. White, who racked up a team-leading 29 catches and five receiving touchdowns last season, is a legitimate deep threat. Zay Flowers and Ohio State transfer Jaelen Gill are both swiss army knives—dynamic receivers who can be used in the run game, lined up in the slot, or put 1-on-1 on the perimeter to run a nine route and burn the secondary over the top.

Ethon Williams and Taji Johnson are a few names to keep an eye on. Williams nabbed three passes as a rookie in 2019, Johnson is a 6-foot-3 true freshman from Power Springs, Ga., and both of them have been frequently popping up on practice reports throughout training camp. CJ Lewis has WR4 potential, too, but the strong-bodied redshirt junior has struggled with drops during his first few years on the Heights. He saw his most playing time in 2018, a season in which he snagged 12 receptions for 143 yards and a score yet, notably, failed to extend for a crucial slant pass on 4th-and-7 with under two-and-a-half minutes to go in the third quarter of BC’s regular season finale against Syracuse.

Cignetti informed the media on Wednesday that, to him, the term “perimeter players” encompasses not only wide receivers, but also tight ends and running backs. Redshirt junior quarterback Dennis Grosel discussed earlier in the week how the most difficult aspect of the new scheme occurs pre-snap.

“Coach Cignetti has a good way of moving pieces around,” Grosel said on Monday, “and it may be that it’s five different guys running the same route in five different ways.”

He explained that, for quarterbacks, it actually makes things easier, because there are fewer offensive concepts to memorize. Conversely, it’s challenging for those perimeter players to know where to line up every play, especially in the early stages of camp. Nevertheless, movement on the outside is a new dimension to BC’s traditional offense, and it could pay dividends for the Eagles’ wide receivers if they’re not the only ones split out wide.

Does Kobay White have a breakout year in him?

White was in the transfer portal for all of 18 days. Following in the footsteps of three-year starting gunslinger Anthony Brown, the Bishop McDevitt High School product entered the second recruiting cycle of his career in January, with one year of eligibility remaining. It made sense. After all, Addazio was gone, as was his quarterback of three years.

Part of the same 2016 recruiting class, Brown and White established an impressive rapport, even as redshirt freshmen in 2017, when Brown won the QB1 job and White finished second on the team with a career-high 34 catches. In his first three years on the field, White piled up 96 receptions, 10 touchdowns, and 1,409 yards—the 19th-most in Eagles history.

Having talked to Hafley over the phone a few times, consulted his family, and realized that his heart “was screaming BC,” White pulled his name out of the portal on Jan. 22, citing “unfinished business.” Now, he’s paired with another Pennsylvania high school football star: Pine-Richland’s Phil Jurkovec. The two are already forming a connection, both on and off the field. It could very well result in White’s best year of his career.

The past three seasons, White has been the Eagles’ top wide receiver, however, his use has largely been reserved for deep shots and 3rd Down conversions. In 2019, White caught 29 passes—13 of the 29 came on 3rd/4th Down, and 11 occurred on 3rd-and-long. What’s more, when he brought down the ball in those situations, he almost always moved the chains, 92.3% of the time to be exact. The only 3rd Down catch that didn’t give the Eagles a fresh set of downs was a 3rd-and-4 reception against Florida State. That was White’s fourth 3rd Down reception of the game. The other three moved the sticks.

White could serve a similar role in Cignetti’s offense, but his targets will probably be a bit more evenly spread out across 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Down, considering that the scheme is expected to be more balanced and less predictable than the last. There’s no doubt, though, that he’ll continue to test defensive backs down the sideline. Since his collegiate debut against Northern Illinois, White has had no trouble creating separation downfield. Last year, it all came together, with show-stopping grabs of 56, 64, and 39 yards against Virginia Tech, Syracuse, and Notre Dame, respectively. To put that in perspective, in all of 2018, BC—as a team—had just three 50+ yard pass plays.

The skill set is there for White to put up 800-some receiving yards. It’s just a question of how evenly Cignetti’s offense will distribute touches this season.

How will Zay Flowers and Jaelen Gill be used?

Over the course of Addazio’s seven-year tenure, gadget plays were sprinkled into the offense, but jet sweeps were a staple of the offense. Last year, it was Flowers’ job to split out wide before motioning pre-snap and ultimately receiving a handoff from the quarterback. Prior to Flowers, it was Jeff Smith. And before Jeff Smith it was Thadd Smith. One after another, shifty sub-6-feet wide receivers were fed into a system that, at times, was all too foreseeable.

That was the case for Flowers in 2019, anyway. He burst out of the gates, rushing for a combined 117 yards on just six total carries through the first two weeks of the season. The rest of the year? A measly 78 yards on 21 rushing attempts, almost all of which came on sweeps. In other words, he averaged 3.7 yards per carry in the final 11 games of the year. In more ways than one, Flowers started the season with a bang but took a backseat once mid-October arrived.

As a true freshman, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla. native logged 395 scrimmage yards through the first six weeks of the year, only to record just 141 the rest of the way. During the final seven games of the season, he was asked to do less and less, limiting his touches to underneath routes, screen passes, and—of course—jet sweeps. In that span, he notched a mere 10.8 yards per reception, 8.6 fewer yards per catch than he averaged in the opening six contests of the 2019 campaign. Aside from a 50-yard deep ball at Syracuse, Flowers’ wheels were stuck within the sticks.

Cignetti is well aware of just how important it is to craft an offense around players’ individual attributes, especially when it comes to versatile guys like Flowers and Gill.

“You look at your players,” Cignetti said on Wednesday. “You think players first, not plays. And then you’ve gotta make sure you design touches for them. Whether it’s in the running game or the passing game.”

Cignetti has done that time and time again throughout his career. When he was with Pittsburgh, he maximized the talent of running back Dion Lewis, who rushed for close to 1,800 yards during the 2009 season. A few years later, when he was the OC at Rutgers, he built the Scarlet Knights’ offense around wide receiver Mohamed Sanu. Carrying the third-best passing attack in the Big East, Sanu broke the league’s single-season reception record (previously held by Pittsburgh’s Larry Fitzgerald) with 115 catches for 1,206 yards and seven touchdowns.

Most recently, Cignetti squeezed the most out of Tavon Austin. While Cignetti was far from perfect during his lone season as the then-St. Louis Rams OC—he was canned with four games left in the regular season—he did know how to create plays for Austin. That season, the West Virginia product tallied 52 receptions (9.1 yards per catch) and 52 rushing attempts (8.3 yards per carry) for 907 scrimmage yards, 239 more than any other year of his NFL career.

Last weekend, Flowers said that Cignetti’s offense allows him to “show off different skills” than he was able to last year, such as his route running and speed downfield. Friday’s practice report noted that Flowers had himself a field day with receptions of 70 and 45 yards, along with a red zone touchdown.

Cignetti also has to find a role for Gill, a former top-50 recruit who converted from H-Back to wide receiver at Ohio State and only managed seven receptions in two years with the Buckeyes. Not much has been said of Gill in the BCEagles.com practice reports (note: practice isn’t open to the media because of COVID-19), but others have praised his work ethic and ability—for instance, on Friday, Travis Levy called him a “great player” who has “a leader aspect to him.” In mid-July, Gill met with the media and said that his time in Chestnut Hill was going to be more about proving himself right than proving others wrong.

“I have a lot of faith in myself,” he said. “My immediate family, my friends all have a lot of faith in me. So I’ve always believed I can make a big impact in whatever role I have.”

Best/Worst Case Scenario?

Best: One or more BC wide receivers becomes a household name in college football for the first time in seven years, and the position group thrives in Cignetti’s offense. The scheme’s pro elements cater to the strengths of White, Ethon Williams emerges, and plays are specifically designed to make the most of Flowers and Gill’s elusive skill set. Two wideouts eclipse the 500-yard receiving mark—a milestone for a program that’s lived and died by the run game for years.

Worst: An injury or COVID-19 sidelines either White or Flowers for an extended period of time, forcing Williams, Gill, Lewis, or Johnson to step up. Cignetti’s offense isn’t quite as balanced as many anticipate, Flowers and Gill fade in and out of games—like what happened to Flowers in 2019—and BC relies on its rushing attack to set up the passing game. An NFL-ready Long leads the team in receiving, once again overshadowing the wideout room.

Outlook: There’s no tape on this iteration of the Eagles’ offense, so it’s hard to tell how much or how little Cignetti will actually use his wide receivers. When he was with the Rams in 2015, only two wideouts ranked in the top six, as far as team receiving yards are concerned. Tight ends Jared Cook and Lance Kendricks were second and fifth, respectively, and running backs Benny Cunningham and Todd Gurley were fourth and sixth. Swap in names like Long and Charlie Gordinier and Levy and David Bailey, and BC could turn in a strikingly similar stat sheet. That said, the offense will be more fluid than Eagles fans are accustomed to, and that means that every playmaker has a chance to break out, including BC’s wide receivers.