ESPN's Sports Science is always fun, if largely fluff. That segment on Mike Evans is pretty fun -- the usual impressive-sounding-but-meaningless metrics, the hyping up of a player, emphasizing his strengths. The note at the end that he tested with the very top receivers they've had through there is pretty cool, at least. But there's at least one good point buried in that segment: Mike Evans has a massive wingspan.
Let's put that wingspan in perspective, with some help of the combine measurement results over at Big Cat Country. Mike Evans was the third-tallest receiver at 2014 NFL scouting combine group, behind Brandon Coleman and Kelvin Benjamin, as he measured in at 6'4 6/8". That's pretty good, but the ridiculous part are his 35 1/8" arms - only a handful of offensive linemen had longer arms, and no receiver came close.
No receiver at last year's combine had longer arms, either. And manually going through Mock Draftable's database of combine measurements, I can't find any receiver with longer arms going back to 2009 -- the first year in which they have consistent numbers for wide receiver arm length. In fact, not even Vincent Jackson (32-inch arms), Brandon Marshall (32 5/8-inch arms) and Calvin Johnson (33 3/8-inch arms) come close.
According to Mock Draftable, Evans' arms are over two standard deviations longer than the average wide receiver's. And the most similar players to Mike Evans are pretty interesting too. Josh Gordon and Marques Colston are among the five most comparable players, with Michael Floyd another encouraging comparison.
All of this would just be uselessly academic if we didn't see him use those arms on film, but we do. Evans displays a humongous catching radius, and that allows him to consistently make contested catches. You know, like this one.
Mike Evans is not like any other receiver in the NFL, honestly. I know we've compared him to a young Vincent Jackson a lot, and there's certainly some validity to those comparisons, but he's still different. He has a bigger catching radius than any NFL receiver. That will help Josh McCown and Mike Glennon tremendously, and there's a good chance that those long arms will allow him to succeed early on in his NFL career.
This year's Tampa Bay Dunkaneers are going to be fun to watch.