One of the keys to Joel Bradford’s success this season is his route running.
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga junior wide receiver, who had no career catches entering this season, is second in the FCS with 119.3 receiving yards per game and his 7.8 receptions a game ranks fourth.
His 1,065 receiving yards this season is UTC single-season record.
“I’ve only been doing this for 10 or 11 years, but he’s the best one that I’ve ever been around as far being able to stop on a dime and start back to his high-end speed as soon as he comes out of a break,” Mocs offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield said.
Elon’s 6-foot-3, 211-pound Aaron Melette uses his filled-out frame to average 7.9 catches for 93.3 yards a game, often out-muscling cornerbacks for the ball. Bradford can’t do that.
Listed at 6-feet and 165 pounds, Bradford makes up for his lack of stature by running precise routes and using his body control to be, in coach Russ Huesman’s now infamous description, “sneaky sneaky.”
One area where Bradford’s size may help him is in drawing pass interference penalties, and the same goes for 5-10, 175-pound slot receiver Brian Sutherland (43 catches for 533 yards).
“They’re both 120 pounds,” Satterfield joked, “so if you touch them it looks like you killed them.”
The Mocs (5-4, 4-2 SoCon), who host Samford (4-5, 2-4) on Saturday, have drawn 16 pass interference flags this season.
“We really design the double moves for Joel because he’s a really good route runner and he can draw people into him at any time,” Sutherland said. “For me, it’s more like, run past them. I pride myself on being fast and I treat my speed as an edge.”
According to the play-by-play sheets from UTC’s nine games, eight interference flags have been thrown on the defender covering Bradford and five on Sutherland’s defender.
“I use it to my advantage,” Bradford said of his size. “Alright I’m small, so if I’m running and he punches me or grabs me, I’m going to move. If I was bigger I could probably just run right through it.”
Bradford, a former soccer player, doesn’t try to sell the slightest contact as a devastating blow the way so many professional soccer players do.
“I never sold anything in soccer, either,” he said. “I was mostly the guy that got hit and tackled but kept going.”
Samford might seem like a target for drawing interference penalties on Saturday since the Bulldogs have been penalized 80 times this season, 20 more than any other team in the SoCon.
However, Samford has been flagged for pass interference just three times, and all of those came late in their rout of Western Carolina.