I like Deebo Samuel. I haven’t stacked a board yet, but I would guess he’ll be a guy who’ll be on a lot of my teams this year. I believe he’ll outperform his draft position.
He came on as a pass catcher last year. I think he’ll be San Francisco’s leading receiver. (Among wide receivers, at least; they’ve got George Kittle.)
Samuel caught 35 passes for 575 yards in the second half of last season.
And I believe Samuel will post the best rushing stats of any wide receiver in the league. They use him a lot on those end-around plays, and he’s really good at them. With his body type, I think he could probably play running back if he wanted.
Samuel ran for 159 yards and 3 TDs in the regular season last year, then ran for another 102 yards in their three playoff games.
Wide receiver runs, I notice, have beenon the upswing recently. I ran the numbers to double-check, and sure enough, the best two rushing seasons of the last 20 years (for wide receivers) have come in the last two years.
League-wide, wide receivers have run for almost 2,600 and 2,200 yards the last two seasons, with 12 and 14 touchdowns.
| RUSHING BY WIDE RECEIVERS | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Att | Yards | Avg | TD | Pt/G |
| 2000 | 214 | 1,408 | 6.6 | 6 | 5.7 |
| 2001 | 231 | 1,556 | 6.7 | 5 | 6.0 |
| 2002 | 343 | 2,329 | 6.8 | 7 | 8.6 |
| 2003 | 321 | 1,889 | 5.9 | 1 | 6.1 |
| 2004 | 260 | 1,322 | 5.1 | 1 | 4.3 |
| 2005 | 238 | 1,285 | 5.4 | 7 | 5.3 |
| 2006 | 250 | 1,447 | 5.8 | 5 | 5.5 |
| 2007 | 203 | 873 | 4.3 | 4 | 3.5 |
| 2008 | 241 | 1,643 | 6.8 | 10 | 7.0 |
| 2009 | 317 | 2,102 | 6.6 | 7 | 7.9 |
| 2010 | 316 | 2,013 | 6.4 | 7 | 7.6 |
| 2011 | 280 | 1,753 | 6.3 | 6 | 6.6 |
| 2012 | 261 | 1,609 | 6.2 | 2 | 5.4 |
| 2013 | 226 | 1,472 | 6.5 | 6 | 5.7 |
| 2014 | 289 | 1,850 | 6.4 | 9 | 7.5 |
| 2015 | 259 | 1,676 | 6.5 | 10 | 7.1 |
| 2016 | 276 | 1,864 | 6.8 | 11 | 7.9 |
| 2017 | 308 | 1,566 | 5.1 | 4 | 5.6 |
| 2018 | 406 | 2,594 | 6.4 | 12 | 10.4 |
| 2019 | 321 | 2,168 | 6.8 | 14 | 9.4 |
—Ian Allan