Charles Woodson believes Travis Hunter should focus on defense
Travis Hunter has magnificently proven a point. Go ahead, keep telling the best player in college football what he can’t do. He wasn’t supposed to survive, let alone thrive, in the face of excruciating demands while playing full-time at two positions.
Or so said the conventional wisdom.
And look at him now: The throwback Colorado Buffaloes star wide receiver and, er, cornerback, is the favorite to collect the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night.
Surely, as the NFL looms, Hunter can’t expect to excel at both positions on the next level.
Can he?
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“I don’t want to say what the man can’t do,” Charles Woodson, the Pro Football Hall of Famer, told USA TODAY Sports. “We just watched him do it in college.
“I would prefer that he didn’t. If I was an NFL team, having a guy as talented as him, I would play him on defense. But I would have some packages for him on offense. He’s too talented of a player not to use at all on offense. But I wouldn’t put him out there full-time on offense and defense. The NFL is, just in terms of the physical nature of the game, guys’ body styles are much more mature, there’s a different speed of the game, just because guys are much better at every level of the game.
“So, I wouldn’t try to play him every snap, but I would put him out there; I’d play him some snaps on offense.”
Woodson, who played 18 seasons in the NFL as a defensive back and now serves as a studio analyst for Fox Sports, is as credible as anyone in reflecting on Hunter’s achievements and assessing the enormous prospects for his NFL future.
On his path to winning the Heisman Trophy in 1997, Woodson was the supreme cornerback who dabbled as a wide receiver at Michigan. During his final two seasons with the Wolverines, Woodson caught 24 passes and logged 6 rushing attempts.
The comparison stops when considering that as incredible of an athlete as Woodson was, he was merely a part-timer on offense. That’s one reason why he’s so impressed with Hunter, who averaged 113 snaps per game – with essentially a 50-50 split between offense and defense – to help ignite Colorado (9-3) to a berth in the upcoming Alamo Bowl.
As a big-play receiver, Hunter caught 92 passes for 1,152 yards and 14 touchdowns this season.
As shutdown corner, he snagged four interceptions, tallied 11 pass break-ups and had a key, game-sealing forced fumble.
“You watch a game and they get off the field on defense and everybody from the defense goes over to the sideline, and he’s in the offensive huddle, getting ready to line up and play offense,” Woodson said. “So, very impressed with what he’s done. Travis has taken care of himself and makes sure that each and every week, he’s prepared to play.”
Still, this sort of double duty would be a bit much to expect in the NFL. Even for Hunter, 21, considered the most gifted athlete poised for the NFL draft in April and projected as a top five pick. Yet after convincing his college coach, Deion Sanders, to allow him to play both ways – first at Jackson State, then the past two seasons at Colorado – Hunter (6-1, 185) has been adamant that he wants to continue playing both ways in the NFL.
It’s going to be a tough sell – at least in envisioning full-time roles at both positions.
Two high-level talent evaluators for NFL teams told USA TODAY Sports, under the condition of anonymity, that they project Hunter as a cornerback who could be used to a lesser extent as a wide receiver – essentially echoing Woodson’s sentiments. The team executives did not want to be identified because of the proprietary elements associated with personnel evaluations.
“I see him as a cornerback that can give you some wide receiver snaps,” said the personnel director for an NFL team. “I think he could play wide receiver as his primary position, but he is more valuable to me as a corner because of the impact he could have there.”
In other words, there’s a supply-and-demand equation working here. It is much more difficult for NFL teams to land an elite cornerback than to secure an elite receiver.
“He has a big upside as a cornerback,” said an NFL general manager. “And you can find wide receivers almost anywhere now, if that makes sense.”
Then there’s just the thought of the demands that it would take for Hunter to excel at two positions. This season, Hunter has logged 688 snaps on defense and 672 plays on offense.
Let it be noted: The line in the sand is drawn for Hunter and those visions of going both ways as a full-time player at the next level.
As the GM put it, “I cannot see how he holds up playing 100-plus snaps per game for 17 weeks in the NFL.”
The personnel director concurs: “I think playing both ways in the NFL would be too much in terms of the playbook, coverages, adjustments, situationally, all of those things.”
Woodson, drafted fourth overall by the Oakland Raiders in 1998, chuckled when asked if he could have envisioned playing both ways in the NFL. Even just a little bit.
“I wish I could have played more snaps on offense in the NFL,” he said.
During the early years of his NFL career, Woodson got a handful of snaps on offense. It’s not even a footnote on his illustrious NFL resume, which includes a Super Bowl championship with the Green Bay Packers, eight All-Pro selections, a Defensive Player of the Year award and a share of the league’s record with 13 career defensive touchdown returns. During the 1999 and 2000 seasons, Woodson caught two passes for 27 yards and rushed once for minus-3 yards.
“I used to beg Jon Gruden, man, to put me in the game more on offense,” Woodson recalled, referring to his Raiders coach. “I don’t know if it was him and he just didn’t want to do it. I don’t know if it was Al (Davis). I would have been more than welcome to play more on offense.”
When he starred at Michigan, Woodson had a much more receptive ear to that suggestion from coach Lloyd Carr after starting receivers Amani Toomer and Mercury Hayes completed their college eligibility with the 1995 season.
“We lost those big-time guys after my freshman year with Mercury and Amani,” Woodson reflected. “I went up to Lloyd, like, ‘Hey, man, I can play a little offense, too.’ That’s kind of how it started. Even with that being said, I only played a handful of plays on offense.
“But for Travis, he just continued that high school mentality over to college.”
As Woodson pointed out, it’s typical for many elite high school players – in Hunter’s case at Collins Hill High School in Suwanee, GA; for Woodson at Ross High School in Fremont, Ohio – to play both ways before declaring one position in moving to the college level.
When Hunter, however, made it clear as one of the nation’s top recruits that he intended to play both ways in college, only Sanders, aka “Coach Prime,” among the many college coaches he encountered during the process, agreed to the possibility.
Sanders, who once played simultaneously as the NFL’s best cornerback and kick returner, while playing as a Major League Baseball outfielder, undoubtedly has a different perspective than most of his coaching colleagues. And he’s the Hall of Famer who played some wide receiver during his 14-year NFL career – most notably in 1996 with the Dallas Cowboys, when he caught 36 passes for 475 yards and hauled in a 47-yard reception during the Super Bowl 30 victory against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“For Coach Prime to see that talent in him and say, ‘You know what? I’m going to let you do this thing. I’m going to let you go out here and play the game each and every snap. As long as you can get out there and play the game,” Woodson said. “I think it’s had a tremendous impact on his life.”
The moral of the story for Hunter: Never say never when telling him what he can’t do.
Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Jarrett Bell on X @JarrettBell.
