When he hits the field, Devin Taylor (#3) will be another interesting FCS signee for the Hokies. He’s 6’1, 200, can play downhill, and matches routes with ease. Add in that he practiced in the offseason against all-everything receiver Antonio Brown, and he’s made some Hokies curious.  

Pro Football Focus credited him with 28 stops* on the year for Illinois State, which would’ve been fourth-best for the Hokies behind Rayshard Ashby, Dax Hollifield, and Chamarri Conner. PFF also gave him an end-of-year coverage score of 90.7; for comparison, this was slightly better than Caleb Farley’s 90.5. That’s FCS oranges to P5 apples, of course, but I think those stats and ratings give a decent picture of Taylor’s abilities. A few Big 10 teams looked at him in high school camps, but he was a skinny 170 pounds, didn’t have standout speed, and played against low-level competition. On the other hand, it was easy to tell from high school film that he had good body-awareness and a knack for snagging tough catches and picks, and he kept those talents as he moved up.

(*PFF’s stops are “tackles that constitute a failure for the offense”)

Taylor made the most of his FCS opportunity. In 2019, QBs completed only 52.5% of their passes against him. He nabbed 14 PBUs and 5 picks out of the 80 total times he was targeted by offenses. You might think for such a good corner he was getting thrown at way too much, and it was a good bit more than, for example, the top ACC corners. I looked at the targets for the six All-ACC corners, and they had between 50 and 70 targets each. But there’s some nuance.

...