There’s a lot to be excited about if you’re an NFL fan in Los Angeles.
For starters, you have an NFL team again. And that NFL team happens to possess a quarterback who went first overall in the 2016 draft, as well as one of the league’s most electric young running backs in Todd Gurley.
All of the hype and most of the attention will be on Gurley and Jared Goff, making it easy to forget about the team’s first-round pick in 2013, Tavon Austin.
The athletic wide receiver hasn’t lived up to expectations three years into his NFL career, but Austin did catch a career-high 52 balls for a career-high 473 yards and a career-high five touchdowns despite playing for a lousy Rams team in 2015. Plus, he rushed for a career-high 434 yards while scoring four more touchdowns on the ground.
And we were reminded down the stretch that he could do things like this:
And this:
Still, he’s yet to put together the type of campaign you’d expect from a top-10 pick. But his head coach, Jeff Fisher, believes that’s about to change.
“When it’s all said and done, we’re going to look back and, I think, see Tavon maybe doubling the number of catches he had last year,” Fisher said this week, per the team’s official website (via Pro Football Talk).
In other words, Fisher can see Austin catching 100-plus passes in his fourth season, which with Goff and Gurley might not be too far-fetched.
