Film Room: What TE Jacob Harris, QB Deuce Adams bring to Wisconsin football
A two-for-one All-22 breakdown of two of the Wisconsin Badgers' newest offensive weapons added through the transfer portal.
Studying the All-22 tape of the Wisconsin football program’s incoming transfers can be a long and arduous process, especially in the case of a grizzled, battle-tested veteran.
But many of the Badgers’ portal signees are still relatively new to college football, with limited experience and sparse resumes.
That brings us to two of Wisconsin’s less-heralded additions: tight end Jacob Harris (Bowling Green) and quarterback Deuce Adams (Louisville).
Harris has a healthy 341 career snaps to his name, while Adams has just one career “start” in which he played just 37 snaps, plus some mop-up duty here and there.
As such, there’s less tape to evaluate for both prospects, hence the two-for-one film breakdown. We’ll begin below with Harris, who should be immediately poised to compete for a starting role:
TE Jacob Harris
In his sophomore season at Bowling Green, Harris served as the Falcons’ de-facto TE2. He was second fiddle to Jyrin Johnson, who reeled in 37 catches for 466 yards and two scores as the leading receiver on Bowling Green’s offense.
While Harris was limited to 19 catches for 182 yards, he tallied five touchdowns to lead the Falcons in that category. So how did a backup tight end lead his lackluster passing offense in receiving touchdowns? We’ll start with his excellent hands:
Harris (#88) goes in motion, helping the Bowling Green quarterback identify that he’s in single man coverage. The route is a simple back-shoulder fade, and Harris does a great job boxing out the corner before contorting his body to haul in the difficult touchdown reception. As nice as the catch itself was, the ability to ensure he got a foot down in bounds is also very impressive.
Harris isn’t an exceedingly enormous tight end at 6-foot-4, 255 pounds. Still, that’s plenty of size to be a matchup nightmare in the red zone, as Bowling Green quickly ascertained.
What’s more, a tight end built like that shouldn’t be moving like this in the open field:
First of all, you have to admire the play design here, as Harris initially lines up with his hand in the dirt, feigning as though he’s blocking. He blocks for a couple of seconds, which doesn’t give the Louisville defenders playing zone enough time to account for him in coverage once he sneaks out into open space.
But schematics aside, pause the clip at the 0:06 mark. You’ll see Harris at the 15-yard line with two Cardinal defenders between him and the end zone. That, of course, didn’t stop him from discarding one defensive back and muscling through the other to complete the 38-yard touchdown.
This certainly isn’t the greatest rep by the two Louisville defensive backs, but the way Harris cuts more fluidly than either of them and extends the ball to break the plane says a lot about his athletic ability.
Given that obvious athletic ability, it’s no surprise that the Falcons actively schemed up ways to get the ball in his hands, even if their lackadaisical offense couldn’t always capitalize:
Side note: It is absolutely inconceivable that the Louisville defensive tackle (#90) didn’t intercept this pass after his teammate batted it down; it fluttered lazily through the air right into his waiting arms before it inexplicably fell to the ground. But I digress.
Bowling Green tries to set up a misdirection tight end throwback screen here, and had the quarterback completed the throw, Harris had room to work with.
You don’t often see screens drawn up to tight ends, but that tells you how highly the Falcons thought of Harris’ play-making ability. It also reminds me of a very similar screen Wisconsin ran to tight end Lance Mason last season in Tuscaloosa:
Tight ends, especially ones that can run and catch, are featured in offensive coordinator Jeff Grimes’ scheme; he clearly liked what he saw in Harris.
“Vying for touches at tight end — brought in two new guys, Ryan Schwendeman and Jacob Harris,” Grimes said. “Both are really, really talented receivers who will need to show that they can block and become all-purpose players as well, but both guys can really run and catch.”
It’ll be interesting to see how the play-caller uses him, because he’s comfortable playing out of a variety of alignments. On the following play, Harris is lined up in the slot at the bottom of your screen:
It’s not the most snappy break by Harris, but it doesn’t need to be; he’s given ample space to run this slant. The contact at the catch point occurs a hair early, but the Ohio native is able to use his body to shield the defender from the ball and complete the catch.
Clearly, Harris is an above-average receiver at the tight end position, especially given his surprising wiggle in open space. His blocking is… a different story:
