Taylor is a target, not an afterthought, in WVU’s offense
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Someday, perhaps years after new West Virginia tight end Kole Taylor has played out what promises to be a successful NFL career, a journalist will do a remembrance of the type of player he had been.
And, when that story is written, there is a very good chance that no matter what has transpired in his professional career, a couple of key collegiate anecdotes will appear high up in the piece.
The first of which will be the description WVU Coach Neal Brown laid upon him before he ever caught a ball in a game for him following his transfer from LSU. Having had a tough time getting a tight end into his offense who could be a weapon catching the ball, Brown gazed upon Taylor and proclaimed him to be “open by birth.”
One look at him and you understand why, standing there at 6-foot, 7-inches, with hands that best could be described as “non-chemical stick ’em” and with an ability to not only do the things you ask of tight ends like blocking, but also to run pass routes.
When asked about the description after catching three passes in three targets in the Gold-Blue Spring game, one of them a nifty one-handed grab while stretched out in mid-stride, Taylor laughed lightly and said:
“I was blessed with height. To me, that’s what it means. I get a mismatch with a lot of DBs and safeties, being taller than them. I naturally have the ability to go up over the top and make a lot of catches on balls that are out of the reach of a lot of safeties.”
He knows how to get open, if his height can get him there, because he was a wide receiver in high school, not having yet grown into his full tight end package.
As for the other moment that will stick with him, it is one you may remember if you are college football fan back in his freshman year of 2020 when he was at LSU, facing the No. 6 Florida Gators in Gainesville, a heavy underdog on a dismal team out of Baton Rouge.
They were under NCAA investigation involving head coach Les Miles, had imposed recruiting sanctions on themselves and a bowl ban. At that same time a sexual assault scandal hung over the athletic department.
They’d lost to Missouri, Auburn and Mississippi State and were trampled the previous week by Alabama, but on a foggy, dismal day in Gainesville, they found themselves tied with Florida, 34-34, in the final two minutes of the game, third and 10.
It was a miracle in progress, but even then no one would have expected it to fall on Taylor to be part of it.
He remembers it this way:
“That will stick with me my whole career. It was good to be able to play that game as a freshman. We were running some kind of vertical concept and I was a checkdown. It was third and 10. He threw to me, and I’m thinking, ‘Why are you throwing to me on a checkdown on third and 10 in a big game?'”
Part of it, of course, was that he was open, so he caught the ball and tried to leap a tackler, but failed, falling far short of a first down.
“I tried to make a play and go up and over and the guy grabbed my shoe off and threw it and we ended up with a big win,” he said.
The guy, defensive back Marco Wilson, didn’t just throw the shoe, which it turned out was a Nike Vapor Edge Pro 360, Size 14, leading Taylor to quip on Saturday, “If NIL was around then, maybe Nike would have got me a big contract. That would have been a nice thing.”
Being nationally televised, a huge game and an odd incident, it would have been famous anyway, but when a flag was thrown and referee James Carter announced to the crowd and to that national television audience that the penalty was for “throwing the LSU player’s shoe 20 yards down the field”, it became lead news in Sunday newspapers across America.
When LSU turned that break into a 54-yard tie-breaking field goal then survived a game-ending missed 57-yard field goal that disappeared into the fog so dense that no one knew if it was good or not, leading to both sides celebrating … well, you get the picture.
Taylor was obviously a talented player at LSU, but this year, he wanted to widen his horizons and go somewhere where he could catch the ball. Brown did the sales job on him as if he were selling him … well, a new pair of shoes.
“I think the biggest thing I was looking for was I wanted to be somewhere where I was wanted and would be utilized in the offense,” he said.
Brown convinced him that was the plan for this season.
“Throughout the spring I built a lot of trust with the coaches and I think you saw that today,” he said after his three-catch afternoon. “I was called on to get the ball in my hands. That’s the biggest thing I was looking for. To get to the next level I have to show I have that ability.”
That trust was the key element.
“A lot of people can sell things. But what it came down to was I knew I trusted my ability and if I came here and showed I could make plays I would force them into making me get the ball,” he said.
“We sat down in the recruiting process and we talked about what their plan is for the tight end. In the past, they hadn’t used it but at Troy they used it quite a bit in the offense. That was a piece they wanted to put in the offense and they emphasized that throughout the recruiting process.
“I think they have kept the promise. Today I made a couple of plays and had some catches. I think we’re revamping the offense and using the tight end this year.”
They began throwing him the ball right from his first practice and continued to show they meant to keep their word when his first catch in the spring game was a play called in which he was the first read.
He had convinced them he could do the job and they were willing to keep their word and write him into the game plan as a target, not an afterthought.