Buccaneers: Mike Evans makes Pro Football Focus top 50 players
Buccaneers receiver Mike Evans was among Pro Football Focus’s top 50 players, but should he have been higher?
Similar to NFL.com’s top 100 player rankings, Pro Football Focus produces their own list of the league’s best players; it was formerly a top 101 list but was trimmed to 50 this year. The other difference is that it’s a list of the best overall players, instead of just the best players of last season. 50 makes it a much more exclusive club, and we know that PFF can perhaps nit-pick players a bit too much, so making the list regardless of where is impressive.
Buccaneers receiver Mike Evans is the first player on his team to make it, coming in at 33 and is shockingly the first receiver to make the list this year. Yet, in my opinion, he should probably be ranked even higher.
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We can start at 28, where Bengals receiver A.J. Green was ranked. Green is a terrific receiver, but does he deserve to come in higher than Evans? Remembering that this isn’t a rank devoted just to last season – Evans would surely be ranked higher in that event – we have to take a look at their last three seasons. Since Evans was drafted in 2014, he’s accumulated 238 receptions, 3578 yards, and 27 touchdowns. In that same span of time, Green has 221 catches, 33302 yards, and 20 touchdowns. Green missed nine games while Evans missed just two, but the raw stats and situations for next season suggest Evans will be the better player in the coming seasons.
Evans could also arguably be ranked higher than Russell Wilson at 26 and Landon Collins at 24, two players that haven’t been quite as consistent as Evans over the last two or three seasons. Cameron Jordan at number 18 could also be debated.
In the past Pro Football Focus has been mostly high on Mike Evans. He wasn’t in their top 101 players of 2015, but in 2016 was their second highest graded receiver overall, with a 93.3 grade. Only seven players total around the league scored higher than that, which makes 33 even more head-scratching. The NFL.com iteration of the league’s top players has reached 31 with Evans’ name yet to be called so they seem to agree as well that Evans deserves to be higher.
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Where do you think Mike Evans should be ranked among the top 50 players in the league? Is 33 actually fair, or did his monster 2016 season warrant more respect? Let us know in the comments.