2000 NFL draft day coverage

Jacksonville wide receivers should put fear in opponents

By Ron Pollack, Editor-in-chief
April 15, 2000

Speed kills.

The Jaguars drafted it. The result could be deadly to opponents.

If a team had taken R. Jay Soward with the idea of him being an immediate starter I might have been a bit skeptical because of his size and attitude.

The Jaguars have Jimmy Smith and Keenan McCardell as their starters, though, so I love the pick.

The Jaguars were in need of a little juice for their passing game. They needed some explosiveness. Soward will give him that thanks to his outstanding speed.

The Jaguars have sometimes struck me as having an offense in which players all over the place are posting impressive stats, yet the team does not always have the eye-popping point total you'd expect to go with these numbers. If you look at the individuals on this offense, the Jaguars should be completely unstoppable but aren't always quite that dominant. Soward might be the guy to put them over the top. Let the other guys post the strong numbers that put an opponent on the ropes, and then maybe Soward can knock the ball out of the park with a big play.

He doesn't need to catch a ton of balls every week. He just needs to provide some big plays. He just needs to create some nightmare-inducing matchup problems. After all, how many teams have a nickel cornerback with the tools to keep up with Soward's speed when the Jaguars go to three wideouts.

And as for the knock on Soward that he can be difficult to coach, I can't think of a head coach in the NFL better-equipped to deal with that than Tom Coughlin.

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