Two down, two to go for Texas wide receiver recruiting
We often talk about a prospective recruit’s floor and ceiling. Floor is what the player is and likely will be with very little college development. A high floor player would be Johntay Cook, who showed up to campus technically refined and with good enough physical maturity. Ceiling is a player’s upside, what he can become if everything clicks, from physical and technical development, to embracing the grind of the sport. With elite speed but not much time focused on his position, Cook’s classmate, Ryan Niblett, is a great example of a ceiling player. It’s nice, to put it mildly, when your high floor players, also have high ceilings, which is the case with Cook, Arch Manning, Malik Muhammad, Anthony Hill, Cedric Baxter, and many others in the 2023 class.
The 2024 wide receiver class is trending towards being a high ceiling class. Freddie Dubose, the first commitment in the class at the position, is all upside. His high-end top-end speed was evident on his sophomore tape, but so too was his rawness. He’s also coming off injury, which tends to lower a player’s floor, but he’s shown the ability to heal absurdly quickly from his ACL injury. That’s actually another sign of his upside.
Texas’ newest commit, Parker Livingstone, would often be stereotyped as a high floor player. I’ll get into why I think he does have a good floor, but I’m much more intrigued by his ceiling. Livingstone measured 6-foot-4, 189 pounds on his Texas official visit. Along with that size, he also ran 21.69 200 meters as a sophomore. To put that in perspective, a very speedy Adrian Colbert won the state title in his classification with a time of 21.55. Again, that was Livingstone as a sophomore. I wish he ran track this past season so we could gauge an increase or decrease in speed, but he chose to play baseball with his friends. He’s no slouch on the diamond, either, and we know that hand-eye coordination translates to the gridiron.
Eventually Livingstone is going to be a muscled up 205-210 pounds. Increased strength should improve his overall speed and twitch. If you combine those traits with his “floor elements” of good hands, ball skills, and being a willing blocker, Texas is going to have a rather complete, and perhaps draftable player on its hands. At minimum, I think he could be a quality possession or red zone receiver, but I think he has more playmaking in him that that. Role the tape, he practically lives in the end zone with 33 touchdowns — five as a freshman (impressive), sixteen as a sophomore (absurd), and twelve as a junior in 6A ball.
Dubose and Livingstone might eventually be joined by St. Louis product Ryan Wingo, who is the personification of upside. He reminds me of Dez Bryant with his stature, speed, and physical play-style. It’s too early to put Wingo in the class calculator but right now Texas leads.
Of course a big topic the last few weeks has been Micah Hudson. The heavy Texas Tech lean will remain a priority for a Texas staff that has routinely shown willingness to play the long game. The same goes for Terry Bussey, who is probably an A&M lean at this time. Texas just needs to split aces here.
With Dubose and now Livingstone in the fold, Steve Sarkisian and Chris Jackson can stay focused on a very narrow group of potential additions with six months left in the recruiting cycle.
The post Two down, two to go for Texas wide receiver recruiting appeared first on On3.
