When you’re putting together a pickup football team there are really only two components you need. One is a competent quarterback, the other is a guy who can go up and get the ball.
With that one-two punch you’ve got an unstoppable schoolyard franchise. Unfortunately, building an offence at the NFL level is a little more complicated. Meshing the right personnel with the right playcalling and formation choices to exploit defences is exceedingly difficult.
Once in a while, though, there’s a quarterback-receiver combination that has that pickup-football connection. If the wideout is dominant enough and his signal caller has enough faith in him, even the most creative coverages are no match for their brutal simplicity.
In recent years, the most obvious example of this kind of partnership was Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson. Stafford would throw at any time from any angle just to get the ball near Johnson’s obscene catch radius.
Now that Megatron has left the building, there’s a new king of the ‘going up and getting it’ school of receiving: Mike Evans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And you can bet second-year QB Jameis Winston is thanking his lucky stars for that.
Evans isn’t the best pass catcher in football. That’s still Antonio Brown. He doesn’t have Brown’s dazzling change-of-direction ability or his incredible hands. What he does have is a massive six-foot-five, 231-lb. frame to go along with sub-4.5 speed and a 37-inch vertical leap. The 23-year-old has the wheels and hops to get to virtually any ball imaginable and the brute strength to own the catch point.
On Sunday, Evans put those skills to use driving the Buccaneers’ surprising win over the Seattle Seahawks with eight catches for 104 yards and two touchdowns. He consistently beat one of the best and most physical corners in the game in Richard Sherman, blowing by the three-time All-Pro deep on his second score.
Following Week 12, the big receiver is second in the NFL in receiving yards with 1,020 and tied for first in touchdowns with 10. Even with those gaudy numbers, it’s not just the production that’s spectacular—it’s the way he’s doing it. No one else in the game is so consistently elevating for improbable grabs like his one-handed beauty against the Atlanta Falcons in Week 9.
In that same game, he managed the rarely-seen “stick the landing” aerial touchdown catch thanks to his immense strength.
What makes Evans so special right now is the degree of difficulty on his catches. He simply is not getting cheap dump-off passes. Of the Texas A&M product’s 73 receptions, only 19 have gone for fewer than 10 yards—and four of those went for touchdowns. While Evans’s 73 catches rank third in football he makes them count more than anyone else in the game when it comes to getting first downs.
| Player | First Downs | First Down Percentage (40+ catches) |
|---|---|---|
| Mike Evans | 62 | 84.9% |
| Next Best Receiver | 50 | 78.6% |
| Difference | 12 | 6.3% |
There are those who’ve criticized Evans for his low 55.3-percent catch rate, but they’re missing the point because he’s playing a different game than everyone else. He almost never goes underneath and takes what the defence is giving—he takes chunks of yards in the teeth of the secondary. With that modus operandi, you simply can’t be as efficient as a Brown or a Demaryius Thomas, who make a fair amount of their money on bubble screens.
Of the 40 top receivers in the league, only one—Terrelle Pryor Sr.—has fewer yards after the catch than Evans. While this can be seen as an indictment of his elusiveness, it’s really revealing as to the style he plays. Evans lives neither in front nor behind defences, he lives above them making catch after catch in rush-hour traffic.
Playing on a team on the bitter frontier of relevance, it’s difficult for Evans to get his due. However, this season he’s made the leap from talented to elite. At this moment he’s the ultimate schoolyard receiver; and his young quarterback is showing himself to be a worthy dancing partner with plays like this one against the Carolina Panthers:
Football is an extremely complicated game, and countless strategies have been concocted over the decades to figure out the best way to score points. Dirk Koetter and the Buccaneers are not master strategists or revolutionary thinkers, but they seemed to have stumbled upon one of the better methods yet conceived: Just throw Mike Evans the ball.