The Raiders caught heat when they used the No. 13 pick on Brock Bowers in the 2024 draft. Two seasons into his time in Las Vegas, that criticism has all but vanished.
Bowers is already being talked about as one of the league’s top tight ends, and some around the team think his career ceiling is much higher than that. One of the loudest believers is Raiders flagship radio host JT the Brick, who came away from training camp convinced he was watching something rare.
“Brock Bowers again was ridiculous. Brock Bowers put on another show today,” JT said on his Raider Nation Radio show on Friday.
He didn’t stop there.
“I’ve seen a lot of great football players in my life. I grew up with Lawrence Taylor.
I followed Reggie White, Joe Montana, John Elway. I swear on my kids, Brock Bowers is going to be one of the greatest football players to ever live.
This guy practices like it’s the week of the Super Bowl. Today, he was running routes, he’s catching balls.
He can catch anything with one hand.”
JT also pointed to what makes Bowers so difficult to defend once the ball is in his hands.
“When he catches the ball in front of you, he catches the ball and the vision that he has to get up field is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Someone described it to me today like it was Raymond Chester in his prime, or even better than Dave Casper, who turned out to be a Hall of Famer.”
That kind of praise has followed Bowers since he arrived, and former Raiders pass game coordinator and interim offensive coordinator Scott Turner added his own last week. Turner, who was in Las Vegas during Bowers’ record-breaking rookie season, said the tight end’s game could translate to receiver and that his explosiveness may even top Drake London’s.
“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.”
There was also plenty of draft-day regret elsewhere. Vinny Bonsignore of the California Post said last week that while some draft analysts were taking shots at the Raiders for selecting a tight end, NFL executives were annoyed that former GM Tom Telesco had gotten Bowers at No. 13.
“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.”
The teams directly behind Las Vegas in that draft were the Saints, Colts and Seahawks. Bonsignore also noted that the Rams were trying to move up to No. 13 to get Bowers.
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