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Sleeper Cell: Treylon Burks and Donovan Peoples-Jones

Treylon Burks

Treylon Burks

George Walker IV / Tennessean.com / USA TODAY NETWORK

I have spent about seven or eight years writing an annual list for Football Outsiders Almanac called “Top 25 Prospects.” This list of players has a lot of qualifiers -- they have to have 500 or fewer career snaps, they have to be drafted after the second round, and so on -- it’s a fun exercise, but to be honest it limits the pool quite a bit. There’s not a lot of football to watch of these guys in the pros at 500 or fewer snaps, and the end of the list usually becomes overtaken by players that caught eyes in college or have had major praise about them from their coaches in camps, but who haven’t even caught many preseason eyes at the professional level.

So I’m not going to come up with limitations on this column. I’m not going to have snap counts. I’m just going to promise to show you young players who the zeitgeist hasn’t settled on yet, and I’m gonna talk about them and why I think they’re fascinating. Today, Sleeper Cell takes you to a pair of young wideouts: Donovan Peoples-Jones and Treylon Burks.

Donovan Peoples-Jones suddenly becoming Cleveland’s No. 1 target

I think we all expected Amari Cooper to struggle with Jacoby Brissett under center -- the fact that the Cleveland passing attack was anemic is not surprising. What was surprising is that Peoples-Jones was the main target for the Browns by far. He had 11 targets to Cooper’s six and David Njoku‘s one. He had a 41.84% share of the team’s targeted air yards, which was 11th in the NFL in Week 1. The targets also manifested an enormous change in Peoples-Jones’ statistical profile. His average targeted air yardage per pass was 8.7. Last year, Peoples-Jones was the designated deep man for the Browns, and his average targeted air yards of 15 was tied for the third-highest among all qualifying receivers in the NFL.

You look at these targets and you see right away that Peoples-Jones is an early underneath read on a lot of them. This is not the same kind of receiver we saw last year.

I expected to pull up this game and watch a bunch of bad Brissett decisions and RPOs, partially because of the lack of separation Peoples-Jones had. NFL Next Gen Stats had him with an average separation of 1.3 yards, the lowest among any qualifying receiver in Week 1. Instead what I saw is a player that got a lot of targets on money downs. I saw a player that they trusted to win quickly outside. I saw someone they threw to on third downs, fourth downs, and in the end zone. I saw someone that Brissett was damn near locked on.

What that told me is that the Browns had a lot more faith in Donovan Peoples-Jones than I thought they did. I’m not going to tell you he’s going to lead the team in air yards this year -- nobody can tell you that after one week -- but the way that he was used didn’t feel like a gimmick. Here’s what Kevin Stefanski said about him after the game and what caught my ear:

“Even when you’re covered, you’re not,” is the kind of quote you hear about guys who keep getting targets.

Peoples-Jones was lightly rostered at best before this game. I don’t see him as a major target on the waiver wire because people will look at the offense and correctly assume that he’s playing on a run-first team and that Cooper has more of a history as a No. 1 wideout. But think about him as a Nico Collins that actually gets targeted in the structure of offense, and then remember the upside that could come into play after Week 11 when he becomes what looks to be the No. 2 target on a pass-first offense. It’s not exciting, must-start stuff unless we see him continue to dominate target share next to Cooper. But it could blossom into that, and he’s not going to be the hot name on your waiver wire this week.

And I do think there’s a non-zero chance that Peoples-Jones continues to be the No. 1 receiver in this offense without Watson just solely based on how condensed their offense is. Winning tight contested balls is not Cooper’s game. I wouldn’t have said it was Peoples-Jones’ before the year, but the way he was used in Week 1 opened some eyes.

Talent versus Preseason: The Treylon Burks Story

It wasn’t quite the same thing as last year’s Ja’Marr Chase story because the problems were more widespread throughout camp and it was hard to get positive Mike Vrabel quotes on him, but Treylon Burks saw his stock plummet from March to August. The Titans were upset with his conditioning. He ran mostly with the 2s and 3s in preseason games. If your redraft league picked in the last couple of weeks of the offseason, there’s a good chance he fell out of the top 10 rounds. He may not even have been picked at all.

...and then in Week 1, he led the Titans in percentage of targeted air yards at 33.7%. Robert Woods and Austin Hooper, the two guys who got most of the positive drumbeat in training camp, combined for four targets.

These targets did not have me as hyped up as the Peoples-Jones targets did. The deep targets looked pretty awkward -- the first one Burks had a step but by the time Tannehill got the ball out, the safety had already recovered. (And it wasn’t a great ball either.) The second one looked to have no prayer from the beginning. But when you look at the rest of Tennessee’s throws in this game, I think Burks remains the highest upside play. The most promising ball to me was the second-to-last target in this clip, the play-action over-the-middle shot that is out of the A.J. Brown playbook. Burks finished second among wideouts in Week 1 with 11 YAC per reception per NFL Next Gen Stats -- nobody is saying he’s Deebo Samuel, but he’s got some juice in the open field.

I spent some time watching the Kyle Philips targets -- he led the team with nine -- and came away thinking he’s a nice late-round find but more of a PPR add than someone who needs to be a priority. He was able to generate some separation on his routes late in the game, but before then a lot of his catches were won before the ball was snapped, with a lot of off-coverage. His best catches felt more like good throws from Tannehill than Phillips just dusting someone:

There are good routes here and he should be a good piece of the puzzle, but in fantasy football he’s got more of a Jakobi Meyers sort of future to me.

Woods’ targets were extremely unimpressive. Even the few targets he earned, the ball didn’t feel like it was coming out on time. I must admit he remains the favorite to be the target leader, but I thought that last year as Cooper Kupp dusted him. Titans coach Mike Vrabel was asked about the lack of targets for Woods and Hooper and he took it in an interesting direction by not really talking about them at all:

That ends with a lot of balanced praise for Burks -- he’s catching the ball well, but he can improve on making guys miss, he can improve by running harder through those deep balls, and so on. And when Vrabel was pointed back to Hooper and Woods later in the presser he again didn’t really talk much about either of those guys specifically.

If you already rostered Burks, I think he’s a hold. If you can spare a bench spot on him, I think you have a solid chance that it pays off later in the season. You can tell from Vrabel’s words and actions that he’s not quite as high on Burks as he was on Brown in Brown’s rookie year. We were already getting major praise for Brown in the early weeks of the season. The tenor of Vrabel’s comments on Burks were much more measured.

This is a situation where I think talent matters a lot more than the current situation. The Titans don’t have another wideout who can contribute what Burks does -- they can’t afford to not target him, they need that explosiveness. The next few weeks may be bumpy as they figure out the target pecking order, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was consistently leading the Titans in targeted air yards as we near midseason.