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The Gamecock wide receiver has the Carolina Panthers buzzing, but is he worth it?
It is typical this time of year for reports to start trickling out noting which prospects have the attention of front offices around the NFL. This year, it seems as though South Carolina Gamecock wide receiver Xavier Legette is the apple of the Carolina Panthers’ eye. Ten members of the Panthers organization made the trip to attend the South Carolina pro-day where Panthers Wide Receivers Coach Rob Moore was running the position drills, according to Jordan Reid of ESPN. Even Legette himself took notice of the team’s interest and told the world about the buzz in their facility during a press conference that’s gone viral because of an accent you have to hear for yourself:
As with almost every prospect in the NFL Draft, the conglomerate of draft analysts has mixed feelings towards Xavier Legette for a variety of reasons. The Panthers seemingly agree with the pro-Legette crowd, so let’s take a look at Legette’s profile to understand what may be piquing their interest.
Legette’s physical measurables are among the most impressive in this year’s draft class. At 6’1 and 221lbs, he clocked a blazing 4.39 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine. While that is just track speed, he also showed elite on-field speed during a catch and run vs Mississippi State where he reached a top speed of 22.3 mile per hour. This would would have been the fastest recorded top speed on an NFL field last year, according to Next Gen Stats.
Further proof that Legette has the elite combination of height, weight, and speed that NFL evaluators covet comes from the Game Athleticism Score metric that PFF recently debuted:
“The PFF GAS rating is built from various metrics PFF computes for every player on every play, such as speeds, accelerations and changes of direction. To compute an athleticism score, PFF aggregates the play-level metrics and scores them via each metric’s season-over-season stability by position.”
Among the players included in PFF’s dataset, Xavier Legette ranked in the 99th percentile. As far as on-field athleticism is concerned, it quite literally does not get much more impressive. For those interested in Relative Athletic Scores, Legette lands in the 98th percentile of athletes since 1987 after also showing off during the rest of the athletic testing portion of the evaluation process.
In the Pro Football Focus draft guide (subscription required), each wide receiver’s prospect profile includes the player’s 2023 ranking in what PFF has dubbed “stable metrics”. These metrics are defined as the statistics that “translate more often than not from college to the NFL” – meaning that if a player performs well in these areas in college, this performance is more likely to translate into their NFL careers.
In order to understand what these rankings mean in relation to Legette’s peers in the 2024 draft, the metrics for the consensus best three wide receivers (Marvin Harrison Jr, Malik Nabers, Rome Odunze)...
