The entire NFL world was surprised to see Carnell Tate drafted as early as he was in April. Titans fans weren’t expecting it, local and national insiders weren’t expecting it, even Carnell Tate himself wasn’t expecting it. “Realistically, I thought I was going to go six or seven or eight,” he admitted after the fact. “I was shocked for real, I didn’t expect to go that high.”

The immediate aftermath involved some grumbling and hand -wringing, but that was quickly washed away by the first couple of practices in Nashville. Even his largest detractors became Carnell fans overnight. He’s looked that impressive so far.

But the pre-draft evaluations are still the pre-draft evaluations. And evaluating this draft outcome in hindsight leaves me with one gigantic question I can’t get out of my brain: did we appropriately calibrate for the fact that Tate may have been competing with the greatest wide receiver prospect the world has ever seen?

Jeremiah Smith might make Mike Borgonzi look like a Carnell Tate genius

There are some who will quibble for the next year over where exactly Jeremiah Smith falls on the historical list of wide receiver prospects. Some will call him the greatest ever. Some will call him the greatest since Julio Jones. Some will call him the greatest since Megatron. In the end, who cares? That’s the company that he keeps. And depending on what his 2026 season looks like, maybe he’s the undisputed GOAT prospect next spring.

He was the number one recruit coming out of high school, and immediately backed it up by being the best skill player on a $50 million national championship Ohio State roster. He was playing alongside fellow first round picks Carnell Tate and Emeka Egbuka as a true freshman, and he was clearly the best of the bunch. If that doesn’t tell you the full story, I don’t know what will.

You can say he’s not the greatest we’ve ever seen, but everybody I know who can evaluate players is extremely hard pressed to watch his tape and find holes in his game. It’s not his size, it’s not his hands, it’s not his speed, it’s not his route running, it’s not his strength, it’s not his run after the catch ability, it’s not his injury history. He is as close to perfect as they come.

So what does that have to do with Mike Borgonzi and Carnell Tate? Well if Carnell Tate ends up being a stud who people praise Borgonzi for taking his highly as he did, I think it’s going to be in large part thanks to our collective miscalculation of the Jeremiah Smith dynamic.

You didn’t have to be a tape grinder to turn on Carnell Tate last spring and get immediately and regularly distracted by the existence of Jeremiah Smith on the other end of the line of scrimmage. He is one of the greatest “funhouse mirror” players I’ve ever seen on a football field. He distorts the reality around him. You have to do some mental math in real time to compare anyone to him: both the defenders and his fellow offensive players. Stacked up against him on the same field, everyone looks inferior.

This is tricky to quantify, but here’s a question for anybody who feels they had a real grasp on the top draft prospects last spring:

How much of your Carnell Tate eval/opinion was unavoidably shaped by the existence of Jeremiah Smith (who made Tate a WR2 by default)?

— Easton Freeze (@eastonfreeze) June 6, 2026

Clearly, Mike Borgonzi watched Carnell Tate and saw through the Smith comparison to a larger degree than many outside evaluators did. It’s not just the direct comparison, either. It’s also about opportunity. Carnell Tate only caught 51 balls last year. He was playing in a high-powered offense with a limited quarterback and plenty of other mouths to feed. A very common and lazy talking point from his detractors was and still is that he has never been a WR1. It’s the same thing we heard about a Emeka Egbuka last season. When you go to Ohio State University, being the WR1 is really hard. When you go to Ohio State University and play with Jeremiah Smith, being the WR1 is literally impossible

I’m not here to overinflate expectations for a rookie wide receiver. He’s gonna have some ups and downs, and so is the rest of this offense. It’s not like he’s being injected into an already well-oiled machine. But if you told me he ends up being one of the great success stories of recent Titans draft history, My prediction is that we all failed to properly calibrate what Jeremiah Smith Smith meant to Carnell Tate’s evaluation.