After the Lions drafted tight end Eric Ebron with the 10th overall pick of the 2014 draft, he wasn’t shy about sharing some outsize expectations for his rookie season.
Ebron said that the team would use him like Saints tight end Jimmy Graham, bragged that he was through the rookie wall before the summer started and that anything short of a spot in the Pro Bowl and the Rookie of the Year award would fall short of his expectations for the season. If that’s the case, Ebron’s year was well short of expectations.
Ebron wound up battling injury and eventually admitted to feeling like a zombie as he tried to absorb everything he needed to learn in his first NFL season. When the year ended, he had 25 catches for 248 yards and a touchdown and the self-awareness to realize that he oversold and under-delivered.
“It is what it is,” Ebron said, via the team’s website. “I kind of overhyped that situation myself not exactly knowing what kind of situation I was going into or which team I was going to get drafted to. It is what it is. It happened. [My] rookie year is over and the only thing you can do is progress. It’s just all about progressing now.”
Ebron isn’t the first rookie to struggle with the transition to the NFL and many of his predecessors have gone on to better things in their second seasons. The Lions will be hoping that the production comes closer to the hype in 2015.