Dark horse roster candidates for the Washington Football Team.
The Washington Football Team currently has 90 men on its roster. Of these, 33 were drafted by the team, 55 were signed as free agents, and three were acquired via trade.
For you sharp readers out there, you will note the numbers don’t add up. That’s because one player, Kendall Fuller, checks two boxes as a draftee and a free-agent signee.
You already know a lot about a lot of these players. Many have played important roles for the team in recent years. Some were high-profile free-agent signees, while others were recent draft picks. All have gotten a decent amount of press here at Riggo’s Rag and through other media outlets.
Today, I want to profile a few of the players who have gotten none of that. I call it the Anthony Armstrong list.
I don’t know any of these guys, but I have had the good fortune to meet players like them over the years. They are among my favorite pro athletes. They all have ability and competitive drive. They have all been stars in high school and college.
But making it onto an NFL field is a herculean task, and so far, these players have come up just a little bit short.
But though they are fully aware of the odds facing them, they keep pursuing their dream. They tend to be humble – even if they weren’t raised that way, then the up-and-down life of a professional athlete has taught them this lesson. They work hard at both the physical and mental part of the game. They tend to have a spirit at which I constantly marvel.
So the following five guys may not be around come roster cut-down day, but I’d like to talk about them for at least a few minutes now when everyone’s possibilities are still limitless and the future beckons with promises of glory.
Here are five dark horses that could surprise and make the team.
CB Jordan Brown
Some of the players on this list have a physical limitation that allows them to excel in college but not in the pros. But a few of them are victims of circumstance. That would describe Jordan Brown.
Brown was a wide receiver coming out of high school who transitioned to defense while in college at South Dakota State. Athletically, he offers a lot of what you want in a boundary corner. At 6-0 and about 200 pounds, he has the size to stand up to most receivers. And he has excellent speed and agility for his size.
The knock on Brown’s physical profile is that he doesn’t have enough strength to stay with bigger receivers. But strength can be improved.
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Brown’s bigger challenge is that he came to the position late. Boundary corner may be the single most difficult position to learn on defense. It is hard to come up with a position that requires the same level of physical agility and mental toughness. Corners get beaten a lot and when they do, everyone sees it. That is not an easy thing to deal with.
Brown’s physical talent resulted in him being a seventh-round draft pick by Cincinnati in 2019, and he has bounced around from the Bengals to the Jaguars to the Raiders before arriving in Washington.
Out of the five players profiled here, I think Brown may have the best chance of surprising people. That’s partly due to the fact that he will probably continue to grow into his position as he gets more reps, and partly due to the fact that teams always need cornerbacks.
The Washington Football Team has six or seven players who would appear to be ahead of him right now, but it is not all that unusual for an NFL team to need to rely on their seventh corner at some point during the season. If Jordan Brown’s technique can continue to improve in 2021, he might be one of those guys.
WR Tony Brown
I began this essay by looking for players who had been in the league a few years but had yet to see any action in a regular-season game. Well, that doesn’t apply to Tony Brown. He was on the field for four offensive plays in 2020. It may not seem like much, but it’s still twice as many as Saahdiq Charles managed.
I have seen more of Tony Brown than the other players on this list. That’s because I watched a lot of tape on quarterback Steven Montez after the Washington Football Team signed him as an undrafted free agent in 2020. It seems like every time I put on some Colorado tape to watch Montez, he was completing a pass to this tall, sure-handed wideout named Tony Brown.
Watching Brown reminded me a lot of Dylan Cantrell, who was just released by Washington after spending part of last year on its practice squad. Cantrell was a big play receiver in college who tracked the ball extremely well and made lots of tough, contested catches.
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Cantrell did not have the speed to be a receiver at the NFL level and was trying convert to tight end, but he was a good 20 pounds lighter than the smallest tight end Washington had in camp, and he couldn’t hang on.
At 6-foot-1, 195 pounds, Tony Brown has good size for a receiver but obviously will never consider the switch to tight end. He made plenty of tough catches in college. He proved to be a tough runner after the catch. In case you haven’t noticed, Tony Brown is tough.
The problem is he simply isn’t very fast. And unlike fellow receiver Antonio Gandy-Golden, who also lacks speed but shows great ability to make tough catches, he doesn’t have Gandy-Golden’s enormous length and catch radius.
Brown needs to get by being a smart route-runner who can provide a decent target on possession patterns and can beat you deep if you sleep on him. Players like that, with the strong hands that Brown has, can find a place on a roster. But maybe not on this year’s Washington Football Team roster, with its influx of new talent at receiver.
DE Jalen Jelks
Jelks has the size and length of fellow Washington Football Team edge rushers Chase Young and Montez Sweat. But he lacks their elite speed and explosiveness.
When you watch Jelks’ tape from Oregon, you see a tenacious, productive college player. Whether he ever finds a position in the NFL is an open question.
Some draft analysts thought Jelks projected best as an outside rusher in a 3-4 defense. I never saw that when I watched him. I think he’s in the right system as a 4-3 end. It is clear he needs to get physically stronger to be able to play early downs, and I don’t know that he ever will be able to do that.
But he could blossom into a situational pass rusher.
The biggest challenge Jelks faces in Washington is that three recent draftees – James Smith-Williams, William Bradley-King, and Shaka Toney, along with 2020 free-agent pickup Casey Toohill, are all ahead of him in trying to lock up a couple of backup positions behind Young and Sweat.
As such, Jelks may face the steepest climb of anyone on this list.
OT Rick Leonard
Leonard, who grew up in the shadow of Catoctin State Park in Middletown, Maryland, has the highest draft pedigree of any player on this list. He was selected in the fourth round by New Orleans in 2018. But he has bounced around to four other teams over the past few seasons.
Like Jordan Brown, Leonard has likely suffered from the position change he made in college. He went to Florida State as a defense lineman, but switched to offense midway through his Seminole career. By his final year, he was a very effective right tackle with great size (6-foot-7) and surprising quickness.
But like boundary corner, offensive tackle is not an easy position to simply pick up. Every scouting profile I saw about Leonard praised his athleticism and criticized his technique.
As I recently wrote in a piece about Najee Toran, the Washington Football Team is placing a clear value on mobile lineman with length. Leonard, along with 2021 second-round pick Sam Cosmi and recently-signed interior lineman Beau Benzschawel, look like oversized tight ends when they get out in space.
Leonard is a classic developmental player who needs coaching to harness his athletic gifts. Washington has a solid young core of tackles right now, but a couple of them – Charles Leno and Cornelius Lucas – are in their free-agent years.
Leonard seems like the type of player who Washington will try to stash for one more season on the practice squad before determining whether he will develop into a reliable lineman.
DT Daniel Wise
Wise shares a lot of traits with Jalen Jelks. Like Jelks, he was a highly productive college player who just lacks the raw power necessary to translate his skills at the NFL level. Also like Jelks, he was initially signed by Dallas, but we will not hold that against him.
Wise, whose older brother Deatrich has been a very effective defensive end for New England, was a tackle-for-loss machine at Kansas. He showed great quickness and an excellent motor. The question that remains is whether he is big and powerful enough to stand up to NFL interior linemen.
NFL history is full of defensive tackles who used their quickness and agility to offset their lack of bulk, but that usually requires elite athleticism that Wise may not possess.
The Washington Football Team has an outstanding core at defensive tackle. Jonathan Allen, Daron Payne, Matt Ioannidis and Tim Settle should all be major contributors in 2021. Wise will probably compete with Devaroe Lawrence and recently-signed Gabe Wright to provide depth behind those four.
These five aren’t the only little-known players on the Washington Football Team as it wends its way toward a final roster in late August. I could have included David Bada or Justin Phillips or David Steinmetz just as easily. Such is the life of a guy trying to make an NFL roster against steep odds. You get overlooked all the time. But every once in a while…
I mean, were you really expecting almost 1,000 yards receiving from Anthony Armstrong back in 2010?