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Gerald McCoy: "Mike Evans doesn't understand yet that he's special"

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have a truly special player in their midst.

David Manning-USA TODAY Sports

Mike Evans is really, really good. And Gerald McCoy offered some insight into what makes him special, today.

"I don't think he understands yet that he's special," Gerald McCoy said. "You have those players who make plays sometimes and it's like 'Man that guy is playing really hard.' And sometimes you're like 'Man that guy's unstoppable.' But then you have those special players where they just kind of make it look easy. Just real smooth. He never looks he's running hard, he never looks like he strains to catch the ball. He stiff-arms people, they go to the ground, but it's just so nonchalant. When you see people like that and they continue to do it, they're the special players."

That's what made Randy Moss jump off the screen. It wasn't just that he was a better athlete than everyone on the field. It was that everything he did was so smooth, and looked so impossibly effortless. He'd clown entire defenses and it would look like he was just jogging.

That effortless ability to make defenses look silly. The speed to blow by defensive backs, the size to box out defenders, the hands to make tough catches look easy. That, to me, is what defines great players: the ones where with everything they do you go "huh, that looked like anyone could do it" -- except no one else actually does it.

Evans isn't in Moss' category, of course. He doesn't have his ridiculous speed. Nor does he have Calvin Johnson's. But he does have Megatron's hands and size, and that same ability to make effortless contested catches. And that's what's going to make him a great player: it all looks so easy, because he's so much better than the people he's playing against.