Rico Gathers Madden Career 2018-2019 - Peak 69 OVR

Rico Gathers never played college football. He was a basketball player at Baylor, the program's all-time leading rebounder, a powerful forward who had not put on shoulder pads since he was a teenager. Dallas took him in the sixth round in 2016 anyway, a pure athletic flier on a 6-foot-6 body with rare jumping ability, betting the tools could be taught football.

The Madden card reflects the raw project he was. It sat at a 67 and peaked at just a 69 in Madden NFL 19, with the attributes telling the real story, elite jumping and toughness numbers next to the modest overall of a player still learning the position. The grade was built on what he might become rather than anything he had done, because the football production was almost nonexistent.

It never came together. His NFL career amounted to essentially a single game of production, a few catches in 2018, before Dallas and then Cleveland let him go, and he moved on to make hip-hop music. Gathers is one of the most interesting athletic experiments the league has tried, a basketball star who could not make the leap in time. The thin high-60s card is the honest read on potential that ran out of runway.