By Lucas Quick (@quick_lucas12) – Senior Staff Writer | Nick Nash winning a 50/50 ball for a touchdown. (Photo by Nick Orozco – Spear Photographer)
All three Biletnikoff Award finalists from last season had declared for the NFL draft. Travis Hunter went second overall to the Jaguars and Tetairoa McMillan was selected eighth by the Panthers.
Nick Nash went undrafted.
The San Jose State receiver wasn’t just a finalist for that designated award, but he engraved his name in part of history. He was just the fourth receiver to ever lead the FBS in catches, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns, known as the “triple crown.”
Two notable players that achieved this were Michael Crabtree back in 2007, who was the tenth overall pick by the 49ers and Devonta Smith, a reigning super bowl champion who was also the tenth pick from the Eagles.
Even with age, combine and other contributing factors that would tank someone’s draft capitol, there is no explanation behind Nash inexplicably not getting a phone call by a single NFL team. He had one of, if not, the greatest season by anyone who put on a Spartan jersey.
Watching this unfold during the draft caught my attention about the NFL and their general managers selecting players. Potential and high ceiling will always be something they look out for, which I am not trying to disregard.
However, I believe there’s this misconception that playing in college for a long period of time is viewed as a negative takeaway.
Of course, you preferably want someone a little bit younger with raw talent. However, we’ve seen players getting drafted with a lot of college experience and it paying off.
Besides, there’s no excuse for that being a problem when 25-year-old quarterback Tyler Shough was selected by the Saints in the second round.
Nash’s combine appearance wasn’t the most successful, which was another reason behind being undrafted. The most positive score he got was for production, getting a 72 according to NFL’s Next Gen stats.
His overall prospect grade was 6.20.
Just for fun, I decided to compare this to a successful Mountain West receiver in Davante Adams. With no surprise, Adams had an incredible production score of 99, but his prospect grade was very identical to Nash’s. He had a 6.40.
Before anyone comes to my head, under no circumstance am I saying that Nash can be as good of a receiver as Adams is. Yet, I am trying to prove a point that there have been very successful players at his position from the Mountain West who also got drafted much higher.
Recently, I made a comment on social media about this same topic. A lot of responses from other people made the statement that, “he played in a bad conference so the stats don’t actually matter.”
The Mountain West may not be a power five conference, but that shouldn’t distinguish that the competition is poor.
Besides, if that’s the case why did Ashton Jeanty get selected sixth overall? He did play in the exact same conference as Nash did.
This entire scenario sheds a very obvious problem SJSU faces in its athletics program. SJSU isn’t necessarily portrayed as a college that shoots out high-level talent to the big leagues. There’s been a large leap though in the last couple of years, especially for the football team.
Since 2020, the Spartans have only had one losing season, a Mountain West championship and four bowl game appearances. They were also top five in the nation in passing yards and had one of the most efficient passing offenses.
None of it gets that much love though, as other teams in our conference have just been more successful overall. It overshadows the recent success SJSU has been able to gain in recent memory and at a certain point, it’s hard to believe that we’ll gain more ground as a program by others.
If a triple crown receiver can’t simply get drafted, I don’t know what more you can ask in an NFL prospect for the Spartans moving forward.
Nash still eyes onto the next step with his NFL career, as the Falcons signed him as an undrafted free agent.
It’s a long journey ahead for him, but he has the opportunity to prove the other 31 teams in the league wrong, and that he in fact deserved to be one of 257 names that got their names called in Green Bay.
