After three fairly sensible picks, the Raiders threw a bit of a curve ball when they selected Cincinnati wide receiver Tre Tucker at 100 overall.
The pick was a head scratcher for several reasons. First and foremost because every draft projection had Tucker closer to the 200s than the top 100. But also because Tucker is exclusively a slot receiver and the Raider already have two good ones in Hunter Renfrow and Jacobi Meyers.
We had questions.
In speaking with Tre Tucker, he mentioned among other things that he was a wrestler in school. A lot of football players talk about having wrestling experience in their background, but usually they’re linemen or maybe linebackers. But a wide receiver?
Tre told the story as to how he used to get in fights with his cousins and they would always win.
“They would slam me all over the place,” Tucker said of his cousins, noting they were state champion wrestlers. “So, I was like, you know what, I think I need to join wrestling. So, I joined it, I fell in love with it all through grade school. I wasn’t nothing but 100 pounds. My freshman year of high school I was wrestling 106. To me it’s just a want-to. I think the sport requires a lot of mental aspects and I think it translates to football. Football is physical, but the mental part is very huge and wrestling kind of boosted that for me.”
Full disclosure, I was a wrestler all through school myself, I naturally respect any football player a bit more with wrestling in their background. It isn’t just a bias thing, it’s knowing the kind of physical skills it instilled in me that benefit me in just about anything else I do.
Raiders GM Dave Ziegler was equally impressed. And it’s those wrestling skills that show up in Tucker’s game that were a big reason he took him well above where most draft projections had him.
“There’s a level of toughness that you have to have to be a wrestler,” Ziegler said. “(Tre Tucker is) a small guy but he plays bigger and he plays with an edge and I think a lot of that toughness comes from wrestling. He also has very good balance and agility when you watch him and if you watch any good wrestlers, that’s one thing that they are able to do is play with leverage, have agility, have balance. That’s a unique thing for a receiver, you don’t often see those two things attached . . . you see it in a lot of the areas he plays especially in the kicking game.”
Along with going over the middle as a slot receiver, Tucker is a kick return specialist and a special teams gunner. It would take toughness to perform those duties as a 5-9, 190-pounder.
That may or may not be enough to explain why the Raiders felt the need to take Tucker in the bottom of the third round, especially with seven more picks on day three they could’ve used to get Tucker, but it explains at least part of their interest in him.
