What Steve Sarkisian said about Ja'Tavion Sanders, the No. 101 overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft
The Carolina Panthers picked Texas tight end Ja’Tavion Sanders in the fourth round of the 2024 NFL Draft. Sanders is the first tight end drafted out of Texas since Geoff Swaim in 2015.
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Here’s what Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian had to say about Sanders, the No. 101 overall pick.
“Carolina got another great Longhorn and a very talented player in JT,” said Sarkisian. “Ja’Tavion has extremely strong hands, great ball skills with the ball in the air and consistently makes contested catches. He was a guy that was very highly recruited coming out of high school but was really a big wide receiver and a defensive end. We got posed with the question of how we’d use him, and we knew with some patience he could become a great tight end. And he did just that, literally spending a year in the lab working on becoming an exceptional all-around tight end. His freshman year, he was on special teams and that was really it, so really most of his 99 catches came over the past two seasons.
“Early on, I’d get asked at every other press conference I had, ‘What’s wrong with JT Sanders?’ and I’d say there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s developing. He’s going to be a great player for us, but he’s in a developmental stage of his career, and sure enough, the next two years he went out and was an all-conference player for us. He works hard at his craft, has an extremely high football IQ, and we asked him to do a lot in our offense, and he definitely did great things for us.
“JT has elite hands, is a guy who can make contested catches, has a really high football IQ and has the ability to play not only in the pass game, but in the run game, as well. He’s versatile, he’s a guy who can split out and play some in the wide receiver type sets. He just turned 21, so he’s still relatively young for a guy with three years of experience coming out of college who learned a new to position in that time. So, I know he’s got huge upside and a bright, bright future ahead of him. He’s still just scratching the surface, and I’m excited for JT and where it can go for him with the Panthers.”
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Sanders joined Byron Murphy, Xavier Worthy, T’Vondre Sweat, Jonathon Brooks, and Adonai Mitchell as Longhorns taken so far in the 2024 NFL Draft.
