The Raiders don’t have a true no. 1 wide receiver, but the consensus seems to be that Brock Bowers will assume that role from the tight end position.
Bowers has a unique skill set that would allow him to play wide receiver in the NFL (something we might actually see this year) and his former offensive coordinator in Las Vegas said last week that Bowers compares favorably to Atlanta’s Drake London as a wide receiver.
Scott Turner was the pass game coordinator and interim offensive coordinator in Las Vegas during Bowers’ record-breaking rookie year, and Turner thinks Bowers might actually be a little more explosive than London.
“Day to day, his understanding, everything about the game just comes really easily to him. You correct him on a technique, he’ll never make the same mistake twice. He sees the big picture, so you can line him up in any different spot on offense, and he’s going to be able to do it,” Turner said on the Just Win podcast.
“I think if he just played receiver, if he wasn’t a tight end, if he played receiver, I think he’d be very similar to Drake London in Atlanta… And he’s actually probably a little more juice than him, like as far as his explosiveness and speed.”
The Raiders took some criticism when they took Bowers in the first round of the 2024 draft, but no one has been laughing since the former Georgia tight took the league by storm in his rookie season.
The California Post’s Vinny Bonsignore said last week that while draft pundits were shaming the Raiders for taking a tight end with Michael Mayer already on the roster, NFL executives were frustrated that former GM Tom Telesco took Bowers off the board.
“I remember Brock Bowers, when they picked Brock Bowers, [an opposing team’s executive] was a little upset because there were a lot of people that loved Brock Bowers,” Bonsignore said on Raider Nation Radio’s JT the Brick Show.
“There were a lot of people, trust me, I talked to about four or five people from other teams that [Bowers] was their guy. They didn’t think that the Raiders were going to draft him that high because they had just drafted Michael Mayer. So there were some cuss words after that one, after Brock Bowers, because his team was one of the teams, one of the many teams that were drafting right behind the Raiders that wanted him.”