Gary Patterson is an excellent coach.

He’s been running the TCU program since 2001 and compiled 11 ten-win seasons, three of which came after the Horned Frogs left the Mountain West to join the power five Big 12 conference eight years ago. Six times his TCU squads have finished in the top ten of the final AP and Coaches Polls.

Patterson went on 94 WIP today with Jon Ritchie and Joe DeCamara, and had this to say about Jalen Reagor, whom he coached in Fort Worth for three seasons:

“Number one, he knows how to practice hard. You’ve got a guy who was a 26-foot long jumper, hundred meter guy and high jumper, and he can go up and elevate even though he’s 5″11 and can run by you. He’s very compact and powerful and I think he and Jeff Gladney, our corner who went (in the first round), both of them didn’t run great at the combine, they were both heavy, and when Jalen came back and had his pro day, he ran the way I thought he would have ran. In Jalen’s case, I think you’re getting a guy, who when I talked to (Doug Pederson), I said not only is he a receiver who can play inside and outside, but he also is strong and is a special teams guy who covered punts and covered kicks. He was a really good returner. When you’re on a 53-man roster I think he can play a lot of positions.”

On the question of hands, Patterson said this:

“As he did in the combine, he dropped some balls this year. I’ll be honest with you; his production, we should have used him a lot more. We probably hurt him in his senior year. His junior year, the last five or six games, we just ran the whole offense through him. When he’s into it, he has good hands. His junior year, about the last six games, we played with a fourth-team quarterback. Everybody else had gotten hurt. This year we played with a true freshman and so it was hard to evaluate, because I think we hurt his potential because of the rest of the offense. We’re gonna have five or seven of our offensive seniors in camp somewhere. As head coach to have to look at it and understand we underachieved there. We’ve gotta play better and I think that hurt Jalen.”

Ritchie, who is skeptical of the Reagor pick, asked about route running:

“I think that’s a positive as far as being able to stem people, how to do things, I think everybody has to learn, but he’s a guy that processes pretty well. He’s gonna ask good questions. If they’ll teach him, he’ll learn really quick. I think that’s the important thing. He’s strong enough too. He’s probably somewhere around a 600 pound squatter, probably a 400 pound bencher. So he’s gonna be a physical guy that can get off the line of scrimmage as a rookie. He’s not a guy that doesn’t know what the weight room was. That first helps you where the physicality of the game is not much where you gotta get up to that level, and then get yourself stronger to deal with the veterans you have to deal with.

Here’s the full interview: