RP Summer Lookback: Chris Brazzell Goes to the Panthers

**Matt Harmon** (0:00)
This is Reception Perception, The Show. Now, James Koh and Matt Harmon.

**James Koh** (0:06)
All right, as you mentioned, Chris Brazzell from Tennessee, 62 receptions, 1,000 yards, nine touchdowns. For Brazzell, he's 6'4, 200 pounds. Man, I'm not gonna lie to you, I was absolutely floored, stunned, and just shocked that he ran a 4-3-7.
There's nothing about the way he plays to me, Matt, where I'm like, oh, he can run a 4-3-7. I thought this guy was a low 4-4s. Damn, 4-3-7 is like legitimate speed. Again, I know we saw some of that over the top, but I don't know, man, maybe I'm crazy. I just thought I didn't see any of that.
4-3-7 speed, I didn't think I saw 4-3-7 speed on tape at Tennessee, but maybe I'm crazy. What do we think of Chris Brazzell?

**Matt Harmon** (0:56)
Yeah, I think defenders play off him so much that they don't give him a ton of room over the top, and I think that's a big part of it. If you look at just his route success rate chart, like yeah, he's actually not that great of a separate, 50% success rate on nine routes while running them at a pretty high volume, that actually is a below average success rate. He's actually not that great at stacking corners on go routes, but they also don't give him a lot of space. He gets a lot of cushion, and I think that's probably why you don't get to see him really truly strided out a ton. And also, let's just be clear, guys playing in the Looney Tunes offense, man, there's definitely some differences to Chris Brazzell than some of the other guys that have come out of Tennessee recently. We're talking about Dante Thornton, we're talking about Cedric Tillman, we're talking about Jalen Hyatt. These are the three main receiver prospects to come out of Tennessee since Josh Heiple took over the program in 2022 So yeah, it's a goofy offense, okay? There's some differences to him, we'll unpack that, but still you can't get around the fact that there's just not a ton of translatable reps in that offense to the NFL. On that note, we mentioned it earlier, Chris Brazzell is a guy who is just purely stuck at that right outside receiver position almost. I mean, he took 95.7% of his sample snaps as the right outside receiver. Just one snap, one snap as the left outside receiver over his Reception Perception sample.
One snap, 510 of his 534 sample snaps of the right outside receiver, one on the outside left, and then the rest of the stuff in the slot.
95.5% rate of snaps on one side of the field is one of the highest I have charted in years. Again, to that point, if you are unfamiliar with this, as someone talk about every draft class, it has definitely been a red flag in Reception Perception to see these guys who are what I called skewed alignment receivers, where they take over 70% of their sampled snaps from one side of the field as the outside receiver. OK, so like if you just look at there, I've charted 35 guys from 2021 to 2025, the last year's draft class. So there's three this year. We've talked about two of them, Surat and Brazil. There's another one that just went on the site, and I'm sure there's going to end up being more, but 35 from 2021 or from 2015 to 2025 So that's 10 years, 35 prospects. Four of those guys have become like high impact starters early in their careers. It's Juju Smith Schuster at 83 percent right outside, DJ Moore, 79 percent left wide, Drake London, 81 percent left wide, Rashid Rice, 84 percent right wide. So if you're looking for trends there, obviously Juju and Rashid Rice became big slot receivers. They did not play outside. Drake London was just a beast. He was a tier one prospect and DJ Moore, even DJ Moore, Drake London are guys that have been best expressed when like moved around the formation, not just purely outside receivers, but they are definitely the outliers. There's some guys who I would say have eventually become moderately useful players. Quentin Johnson is one of those guys. Cedric Tillman is one of those guys, another Tennessee volunteer receiver.
And then there's just like a ton of busts, like outright, you know, the butt, like Corey Coleman, McQuann Treadwell back in the day. I mean, just a ton of huge, maybe at some point I'll actually put the full list on the site so people can check this out. But like, Jevon Baker, remember him, complete flame out. Again, there's some moderately useful players like Josh Reynolds and, you know, De'Ami Brown, like James Washington. But for the most part, it's that level of guy and then just complete flame outs. And those four, like, actually good players. We'll see. Obviously, guys in last year's class still have time to make their mark. But it's players like Jack Bess. You didn't get on the field for the Raiders as much as I like. Jack Bess didn't get on the field really for the Raiders. Torrey Horton, player I really, really like. But obviously, I think he looked like he was going to maybe be an outlier on this list. But we don't know. So there's definitely, it's definitely a shaky part of any players profile. I think there's really no getting around it. Like I said, I'll probably put the whole list on the site at some point, so people can refer to it over the course of draft season. But that's a big problem when we're talking about, it's not a role that anybody holds in the NFL. You don't play one outside receiver position on 70 percent of your snaps. It just doesn't happen. You can argue, James, whether there's a correlation or is a causation here to this.