Quentin Johnston Is One of Several TCU Players to Know Before the Draft

Plus more notes on college football championship weekend, including thoughts on how Deion Sanders is a case study in the coaching pipeline.

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The last few years, my Six From Saturday notes have been included at the bottom of my MMQB column on Monday mornings. This year, they’ll be published as a separate post each week. Here are my thoughts on this weekend’s college action, geared mostly toward what should be of interest to NFL fans.

1) It’s easy to forget that TCU is no longer a mid-major—and the Horned Frogs haven’t been since joining the Big 12 a decade ago. Now in their 11th Power 5 season, they’ve taken on the look, from a talent standpoint, of a Power 5 team, which is a huge credit to what Gary Patterson built, and what Sonny Dykes has been able to do in his first year there. As such, there’s real NFL talent on the roster.

That starts with 6'4", 215-pound junior receiver Quentin Johnston, who could go in the top-20-or-so picks, and should vie to be the first wideout taken in April. “Long, fast, explosive athlete who has really good hands,” says one AFC exec. “He’s physical to attack the ball and really tough after the catch.”

Johnston has 53 catches for 903 yards in 12 games this year :: Jay Biggerstaff/USA TODAY Sports

And QB Max Duggan, RB Kendre Miller, LG Steve Avila and C Alan Ali all have a shot to make it to the league, and that’s just on offense. All told, TCU should have a handful of guys drafted, and while it may not have the roster that Georgia or Ohio State does, it won’t be totally out of place in the College Football Playoff.

2) We all got a look, again, at just how loaded Georgia is with its dismantling of LSU, and there are two things that really stuck out to me. The first is the absolute dominance of Jalen Carter. We had this in the column, from an AFC exec, about a month ago, and it really does illustrate how Carter, a true junior, caught the eyes of scouts early and has kept getting better since—not an easy thing to pull off with more and more focus on stopping him coming from opponents over time. “If you watch last year, with all that first-round talent out there, there were times he was the best player on the field,” says the exec. “He’s versatile, you can line him up at DT, put him on the end, let him rush from there. He’s big, athletic, can play the run. I don’t know how high in the first round he goes, but he’s up there.”

The NFS preseason rankings, distributed to teams, had him as the top prospect in the class, right in front of Alabama’s Will Anderson, and I’d imagine all 32 teams will have him in that neighborhood in the spring.

The second thing that stood out on Georgia? Their tight ends, both junior Darnell Washington (draft eligible in 2023) and sophomore Brock Bowers (draft class of ’24), are complete freak shows. And both will be relatively high draft picks. As will a whole bunch of guys on the Bulldogs’ roster.

3) How about the team that beat the Frogs in the Big 12 championship? I love what Kansas State coach Chris Klieman has built in Manhattan, making Bill Snyder’s old program one with a lot of North Dakota State (where he came from) influence and even traces of Tom Osborne’s Nebraska (Craig Bohl, Klieman’s old boss, was the architect of the NDSU dynasty and once a Cornhusker assistant for Osborne and Frank Solich). That shows up in the way the players move in lockstep, force and take advantage of mistakes, and rarely make mistakes of their own—they’re going to make you really beat them. And on Saturday in Arlington, that meant making TCU grind out a yard in overtime that, ultimately, TCU couldn’t grind out. So Klieman’s Wildcats may never have an all-star roster, but they have a lot of good, sound players who’ll wind up finding roles in the NFL, I’d bet. Like Osborne and, for that matter, Snyder always did.

4) I’d still vote for USC’s Caleb Williams to win the Heisman, and maybe part of that is that no one really took the bull by the horns and held on to it over the last month of the season. Williams was the leader after his virtuoso performance against Notre Dame, and I have a hard time blaming him for USC’s loss to Utah on Friday night—he played most of it on one leg, and his defense absolutely collapsed late. As we’ve said a few times now, the NFL’s already got its eyes on Williams, and he and UNC’s Drake Maye have a chance, a chance, to make the 2024 draft class a special one.

5) Deion Sanders’s getting the Colorado job is fascinating and will be a great case study in the career path former players take. In a way, what Sanders has done isn’t unlike what Jim Harbaugh did 20 years ago. After two years as a low-level Raiders assistant, Harbaugh eschewed climbing the ladder conventionally to take the head coaching job at I-AA San Diego. He parlayed three strong years there into the Stanford job and was on his way (similar to how Sanders’s success at Jackson State has fast-tracked him). Add in the Jeff Saturday experiment, and Mike Vrabel’s and Kevin O’Connell’s success after moving quickly through the ranks, and there are plenty of reasons for NFL and college programs to be more aggressive in looking outside the box.

6) One other thing on Sanders, while we’re here: He’ll be able to recruit. How do I know? Well, other than common sense, there’s my experience working with the guy for six years at NFL Network. And when I carried that mike flag into a locker room, I can say there was a pretty good chance someone I talked to was going to say, “Tell Prime I said what’s up.” For one reason or another, Sanders resonated with young players more than any player I’ve ever seen before. I’d be very surprised if that doesn’t translate on the recruiting trail at Colorado, the same way it did at Jackson State.