DeVonta Smith is the reigning Heisman Trophy winner and absolutely tore it up in the college football playoff. He went for 1,856 yards and 23 touchdowns in 2020 and was originally thought to be a shoe-in for the top ten, come NFL Draft.

The only knock against Smith is that he’s light. He’s tall enough, runs fantastic routes, and has great hands, but he’s got a smaller frame and is built more like DeSean Jackson and less like Mike Evans, which had some people wondering about durability at the NFL level.

Now we’ve got this:

Before commenting on this, here’s a rare W from Eliot Shorr-Parks:

ESP is on point here. Smith was tearing it up all over the field in the CFP. And we’d be naive to think that he’s not going to bulk up a bit once he hits the NFL ranks. All he has to do is add four pounds and he’s playing at the same specs D Jax was coming out of college. If he adds 15 pounds he’s Tyler Lockett. Guys like Marvin Harrison and T.Y. Hilton were not/are not hulking dudes.


One of the problems here is that Alabama had him listed at 175, so there’s a pretty big discrepancy there. But when you watch him play, you don’t see a ton of things that are concerning, RE: size. He doesn’t seem to get jammed at the line of scrimmage. He does well enough on contested throws. He can play through contact as well. You’d see red flags go up if he was consistently getting bullied, but that doesn’t appear on the film. And he was having great success in college football’s toughest conference, which regularly sends defensive backs to the NFL.

If Smith is sitting there at #12, the Eagles would have to ask themselves whether or not adding the Heisman winner is redundant. They drafted a smaller receiver in Jalen Reagor just last year, and if you have the thought that the Birds could go for a bigger “possession” type of guy, then maybe Smith would not be the best fit here. They’d be justified adding talent at a different position instead.

It’s a fascinating case of favoring measurables or favoring your eyes. Maybe the weight causes Smith to slip a bit. If anything, it makes his draft position harder to project. But when you watch the guy play, it’s hard to imagine teams passing up on this: