Michigan Football: Looking like Donovan Peoples-Jones made mistake

Did former Michigan football player Donovan Peoples-Jones make a mistake declaring for the NFL draft, the early returns indicate that he may have.

Looking back at the career of Donovan Peoples-Jones at Michigan football, it’s hard to call his three-year career with the Wolverines anything but a disappointment.

Peoples-Jones came to Michigan football as the No. 1 ranked wide receiver in the 2017 recruiting class. He was supposed to give the Wolverines an elite playmaker, a true impact player.

Only, that never came to fruition. Peoples-Jones had moments and he did haul in 14 touchdowns during his final two years with the Wolverines, but he never became the dominating force that he could have been.

Some might say that is because of quarterback Shea Patterson, as well as playing with John O’Korn, Wilton Speight and Brandon Peters as a freshman.

However, as some new stats show, maybe Patterson wasn’t as bad as we thought, at least in terms of throwing the football accurately.

Obviously, if you watched Michigan football, you know Patterson had issues, especially with throwing the ball down the field. In fact, in an article published on CBS sports, citing stats from Sports Info Solutions,  no college quarterback had a greater disparity last season between the percentage of on-target passes and completion percentage.

Patterson threw the ball on target 75.2 percent of the time but only completed 56.2 percent of his throws, which was the highest differential in all of college football by a good three percentage points. Peoples-Jones, one of the most frequent targets, certainly has to take some of the blame.

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Peoples-Jones will always have his touchdown against Michigan State and really, his play against the Spartans and Notre Dame, as well as Penn State a year ago was some of his finest work. But it was never consistent enough.

Peoples-Jones also missed way too many opportunities to make big plays. A prime example came against Ohio State when he dropped a touchdown pass on a key third down in the red zone, as the Wolverines were trying to hang around against the Buckeyes.

It was a tough play, but the kind you’d expect an early-round pick to make. Speaking of that though, at least according to ESPN’s Mel Kiper, Peoples-Jones isn’t ranking all that high among the 2020 draft class.

Kiper released his top-10 by position list and notably absent at wide receiver was Peoples-Jones, who caught just 34 passes for 438 yards last season for a 12.9 average per reception.

Peoples-Jones always seemed to be betting on his potential by declaring for the NFL draft and right now, you have to wonder if it was a mistake? At the very least, he is going to have his work cut out for him as he tries to make his way into the first few rounds this spring.