The 5 different ways to be a successful NFL wide receiver

Wide receivers catch footballs, and then (hopefully) run with them. That’s their most basic job description, and the way you would describe their function in football to a person from an area of the world where football is something entirely different.

But it’s not that simple, because nothing ever is in our Americanized football. We know this because over the past few weeks I’ve explored the different ways successful quarterbacks do what they do, and same with running backs.

Now: the five different types of successful wide receivers.

The Large Men With Spider Hands

The league’s premier wideouts typically aren’t small humans, but how they use that size varies. The most entertaining use comes from the tall, lanky ones with wingspans that could lead to flight at any moment, and a catch radius which is therefore massive.

There’s that trendy term: catch radius. It’s quickly grown to become part of the standard NFL vernacular in recent years, with nearly as much popularity as most Mayockisms, and Mike Mayock said it quite a bit himself about a month ago while describing Bucs first-round pick Mike Evans. A catch radius is the space occupied by the imaginary circle drawn when a receiver’s arms are outstretched.

That’s the technical definition of the term. In practice, a wide catch radius looks like this…

What makes the likes of Alshon Jeffery, his teammate Brandon Marshall, A.J. Green, Dez Bryant, and Plaxico Burress (in his prime) special is the massive airspace they can occupy combined with incredible hands and coordination, and their leaping ability.

That means anything within their wide circumference can be caught confidently, a circle which elevates to great heights.

The Field Burners

Speed isn’t unique among the wide receiver species. But what sets this group apart is they’re blazing fast even at a position known for being… well, really fast.

There’s a tiny inferno at their feet, and that usually results in many deep home run cuts. We see that with Victor Cruz, especially during his breakout 2011 season. That’s when he had four catches that went for 70 yards or more (including a 99 yarder) while averaging 18.4 yards per.

Josh Gordon’s next level speed makes his suspension for likely a full season so damn traumatizing. In only his second season Gordon became the first wide receiver to record back-to-back +200 yard games. He did that during a year when he averaged 18.9 yards per catch, led the league in receiving yards (1,646) despite missing two games, and he had a four-week stretch after the Browns’ bye with 774 yards.

DeSean Jackson belongs here too, fresh off a year with a single-season high 25 catches for 20 yards or more, and two weeks when he had over 190 yards. T.Y. Hilton is also a scary speed man (327 yards over the Colts’ two playoff games), and of course going back further there’s also peak age Randy Moss, the kingpin of fast receiver men.

Then there’s a different type of speed, the kind that doesn’t make any sense.

The Guys Who Really Shouldn’t be Fast

These are absurdly large human-ish beings who are somehow able to cover great distances in a short period of time. The example that comes to mind immediately for everyone is Calvin Johnson, who’s a tank at 6’5” and 236 pounds.

While his size is fun, the selling point for Johnson during his draft year and still now -- with his incredible average of 1,712 receiving yards over the past three seasons -- is how he combines bulk with speed. At the 2007 Scouting Combine, Johnson ran the 40-yard dash in 4.35 seconds.

Some perspective: DeSean Jackson is one of the pure speedsters gushed about above, and he posted the exact same time despite being 61 pounds lighter than Johnson.

Andre Johnson also isn’t at all normal with his 4.43 dash time while weighing 230 pounds. Vincent Jackson gets downfield pretty rapidly too for a guy who stands at 6’5”, and then there’s Demaryius Thomas.

Thomas had the most yards after the catch in 2013 (704, nearly half of his yardage total), and he did it while moving 229 pounds of person.

But there are other ways to compile those chunky yards after the catch.

The Sure-Handed Grapplers

These are highly physical receivers capable of matching today’s large corners, and they find space often through that physicality, breaking away after the catch.

This breed of wideout is tenacious, and absolute hell to play against because they’re always open after running precise routes, they receive high volume targets to increase the pain inflicted, and they can make quick moves. In space they become punt returners, and like Golden Tate -- a member of the Grappler group -- sometimes they are punt returners.

Michael Crabtree is the pack leader here, with his 536 YAC in 2012, and Pierre Garcon is close behind. This past season Garcon hacked away on mostly short-to-intermediate looks, averaging 11.9 YPC yet still compiling 1,346 yards, doing it with a league leading 184 targets.

The Shifty Slot Vacuums

There’s some overlap here with a few of the field burners mentioned above (Cruz, Hilton), but often the few top tier slot specialists accomplish their football vacuuming through other still effective means.

When he retires, Wes Welker will do it as the greatest of his kind. Over his six years with the New England Patriots Welker utilized superb body positioning and an ability to bait defensive backs into guessing the wrong direction for his next shift or twitch. The result was a yearly average of 1,243 yards and 112 catches.