Brenden
Rice.
Brenden
Rice.
USC· 6'2"· 208 lb· 4.50s 40
"The last name guaranteed him attention and nothing else: Jerry Rice's son went in the seventh round on ball skills and red-zone tape, and two years later he is still waiting on his first NFL catch."Pre-draft read
Rice is a boundary X receiver who wins with size, timing and ball skills rather than burst. He aligns outside, eats up cushion with long strides and does his best work on the vertical tree: back-shoulder fades, corner routes and the 50-50 balls where he tracks the flight early and adjusts his frame late.
The second trait is scramble feel — he finds the soft spot in zone and works back to the quarterback as well as any receiver in the 2024 class, which is how twelve touchdowns showed up on 45 catches. Against press he stalls, and his short-area quickness is ordinary, so the separation comes from setup and leverage instead of suddenness. The signature is the red-zone finish: at the goal line he plays taller than his measurement.
A vertical play-action offense that lets him win outside the numbers on timing throws and isolates him in the red zone, with a quarterback willing to throw the back-shoulder ball and extend plays.
Year 1: WR5 who earns a helmet on special teams and takes 100-150 snaps as a vertical/red-zone package receiver. Ceiling: a WR3 who plays 500 snaps and turns eight to ten targets a year into scores.
A quick-game, option-route offense built on separation underneath (Shanahan-tree motion timing or a heavy slot rotation) - he needs the ball in the air, not in rhythm at five yards, and a press-man diet with no free release starves him.
His college scoring rate came almost entirely from Caleb Williams's off-schedule extensions; a structured pocket passer removes the exact plays he was drafted for.
Brenden Rice 2023 USC Football Highlights
Full senior-season reel: back-shoulder wins, scramble-drill touchdowns and the red-zone finishes.
Brenden Rice Career Highlights || 2024 NFL Draft
Career cutup across Colorado and USC used by draft evaluators in the 2024 cycle.
Brenden Rice Ultimate Colorado Highlights
Boulder tape including the return work and the early vertical flashes as an underclassman.
Rice is a four-year, two-school outside receiver who arrived at USC as a role player and left as Caleb Williams's most trusted scoring target. He is a builder, not a phenom: six catches as a Colorado freshman, a supporting year in Boulder, then two seasons of steady climb in Lincoln Riley's offense. The football identity is a big-bodied X who attacks the ball in the air.
The senior tape carried him. He caught 45 passes for 791 yards and twelve touchdowns in twelve games, a 17.6-yard average and a touchdown rate that ranked among the best in the Pac-12, most of it on vertical shots and improvised plays with Williams off schedule. He tested well enough at the combine to confirm the size-speed profile without changing the evaluation. The flags were consistent across every board: he struggled to release against press, he was not a natural separator underneath, and the production was concentrated in a scheme and a quarterback that made contested targets easy to come by.
Boards had him in the fourth-to-fifth-round band as a developmental Z/X with special-teams value, and the name added noise in both directions. He slid to the seventh, where Los Angeles bought the bloodline, the frame and the red-zone tape at a price with no risk attached.
- 01
Ball skills
tracks the deep ball early and adjusts his frame late, the trait that produced twelve touchdowns on 45 catches as a senior.
- 02
Red-zone finishing
plays taller than 6-2 at the goal line, shields defenders on fades and wins the back-shoulder throw consistently.
- 03
Scramble feel
one of the best in the class at breaking off a route and finding open grass when the quarterback leaves the pocket.
- 04
Size-speed base
4.50 at 208 pounds with a 36.5-inch vertical, enough to stress a corner vertically from a standard outside alignment.
- 05
Return background
17 kick returns for 469 yards at Colorado plus an 81-yard punt-return touchdown as a freshman, real fourth-phase value.
- 01
Press release
stalls at the line against physical corners and lacks the hand technique to escape cleanly, the single biggest projection flag.
- 02
Short-area quickness
not sudden out of breaks, so he rarely creates separation underneath and needs setup and leverage to get open.
- 03
Route tree
the college diet was heavy on verticals and scrambles, and the intermediate route detail was underdeveloped at declaration.
- 04
Production context
his best season came with a Heisman quarterback and a run-heavy defense forcing shootouts, inflating contested-target volume.
— — — positional median (p50)
- 40 yd
- 4.50sp50
- Vertical
- 36.5inp50
- Broad jump
- 119inp50
- Three-cone
- —s
- Shuttle
- —s
- Bench
- —rep
| Yr | Team | G | Rec | Yds | TD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Colorado | 6 | 6 | 120 | 2 |
| 2021 | Colorado | 11 | 21 | 299 | 3 |
| 2022 | USC | 14 | 39 | 611 | 4 |
| 2023 | USC | 12 | 45 | 791 | 12 |
| Career | — | 43 | 111 | 1821 | 21 |
Season lines verified against official cfbstats player pages (Colorado 2020-2021, USC 2022-2023). Games corrected from a prior CFBD import that listed four games in 2020 and ten in 2021; cfbstats has six and eleven, so the career total is 43 games, not 40. Receiving sums check out exactly: 6+21+39+45 = 111 receptions, 120+299+611+791 = 1,821 yards, 2+3+4+12 = 21 touchdowns. He carried the ball only in 2021 (6 att, 54 yds), so rushing is left blank in the other seasons rather than zero-filled. Return work is not part of the receiving line: 2 kick returns in 2020 plus an 81-yard punt-return touchdown, 17 kick returns for 469 yards in 2021, 3 kick returns for 49 yards in 2022.
A dash means the figure is not published by a source we trust — never a zero we invented.
Late-round wideout with real traits who never nailed down a role and bounced through rosters.
Long outside receiver whose value is vertical shots and contested wins rather than separation.
Big-framed sixth-rounder whose NFL career amounted to camp bodies and special-teams tryouts.
Everything above is the pre-draft evaluation. This section is what actually happened — updated year over year.
Los Angeles kept him on the roster out of camp but never used him. He appeared in three games as a rookie, played three offensive snaps and never got a target before the Chargers put him on injured reserve in early November 2024. The 2025 season was worse: Los Angeles released him at the August cutdown, and he spent the fall bouncing between practice squads — New England in early November for a week, Seattle for two, then Las Vegas in December without ever being elevated to the active roster. The Raiders gave him a futures deal in January 2026 and cut him in May, Green Bay claimed him off waivers the next day, and the Packers waived him with a non-football injury designation in late July 2026. He has not caught a regular-season pass.
In hindsight the seventh round was the honest price and the league has treated it as such. The flags scouts wrote down — the press release, the missing suddenness — are exactly what has kept him from beating out WR5s, because a receiver who cannot win off the line without a scramble has no path to snaps when the ball skills are the only differentiator. There is nothing embarrassing about the pick; Los Angeles risked nothing and got nothing. At 25 with an injury designation and no production, the career is one more claim away from ending, but he remains young enough that a camp body with his tracking ability will keep getting phone calls.
Data note: Season lines verified against official cfbstats player pages (Colorado 2020-2021, USC 2022-2023). Games corrected from a prior CFBD import that listed four games in 2020 and ten in 2021; cfbstats has six and eleven, so the career total is 43 games, not 40. Receiving sums check out exactly: 6+21+39+45 = 111 receptions, 120+299+611+791 = 1,821 yards, 2+3+4+12 = 21 touchdowns. He carried the ball only in 2021 (6 att, 54 yds), so rushing is left blank in the other seasons rather than zero-filled. Return work is not part of the receiving line: 2 kick returns in 2020 plus an 81-yard punt-return touchdown, 17 kick returns for 469 yards in 2021, 3 kick returns for 49 yards in 2022.