Previous Entries: Isaiah Tupou, Sol-Jay Maiava

Specifics: 5'11, 170 pound, 3-star CB from Chandler, AZ

Other offers: Syracuse, Navy, Army, Air Force, Nevada, Wyoming, San Diego State, New Mexico, New Mexico State, Tulane, UTEP, and several FCS schools (including multiple Ivy League schools)

Strengths: His agility is the cornerstone of his game. A decent chunk of his film is of him on offense (QB and WR) or as a kick and punt returner, and this is actually where his excellent agility is most blatantly seen. He rarely ever outruns defenders, but what he does is outmaneuver them. The body control and how he gets through small gaps so easily is really quite impressive. On defense, what really stands out about his agility is how incredibly fluid his hips are. Getting your hips around is one of the keys to playing cornerback effectively, and I don't know that I've ever seen a recruit who does so as smoothly as Harper (I don't think there's anyone currently on BYU's team who has hips as fluid as Harper's either). I know it may sound strange to some to fixate on a player's hips so much, but this really is an important part of playing the cornerback position that Harper is absolutely phenomenal at. That hip movement is a big part of what allows a CB to stay with receivers as they make cuts and moves, and Harper's is so good that it wasn't uncommon to see him get out of a break before the receiver who initiated it did, and get the better position to make a play on the on the ball , because he got his hips around so quickly and so smoothly.

This excellent agility is combined with great eye awareness. We've all seen plenty of penalties where the defensive back didn't get their head around and was just looking at their man. That is not an issue in the slightest with Harper. His eyes are quite often in the backfield while staying right on his man, which is impressive. This allows him to also be rather effective against the rush and against scrambling QBs, as he always seems to quickly diagnose what option is being take by the offense and frequently is in position to stop both the pass and the run on any given play. That awareness combined with his agility is pretty much exactly what every DB coach wants to see, so Gilford and the other defensive coaches will have one heck of a base off of which to build him as a college player.

Weaknesses: A lack of going up strongly and decisively on the ball is the most noticeable issue with him as a CB. I don't mean to say that he's physically weak, he's actually surprisingly solid for someone of his size when it comes to being physical. The issue is that even though he puts himself in position to make the knockdown or interception on a lot of passes, he doesn't go up at the ball with enough power. He gets his arm up in the vicinity of the ball, but he needs to be more aggressive and decisive at attacking the ball itself as a defender. There were a decent chunk of plays where he put himself in perfect position but then only made a minor deflection of the ball, which allowed the receiver to still get their hands on it, even if they couldn't make the catch. College receivers are going to be much more aggressive and have stronger hands, so slight deflections oftentimes won't cut it at the college level, as there needs to be a stronger play on the ball from the DB to prevent a catch or come up with a big interception. 

The other issue is a lack of top-end speed. As I mentioned previously, in his offensive and special teams highlights you could see pretty clearly that he wasn't usually faster than the guys he was going against, he was just much more agile than them. It's not that he's slow, but in his film he never really had to deal with a burner as a defender, so his excellent agility and awareness were more than a match for those guys who were a bit faster than him. What will happen in college though when coaches need him to run man coverage on a speedster? He'll be able to match their moves and know where the ball is, but there is a decent chance that those guys can eventually get open against him by just flat-out outrunning him. He'll be able to cover receivers with average spped just fine, or speedsters who are running shallow routes that depend on their break, but there is some reason for concern when it comes to how well he'll be able to cover speedsters on deep routes with no help over the top. Maybe he'll get faster with a college strength and conditioning program, some players do, but currently he doesn't have quite the top-end speed that you'd like to see from most CBs at the college level.

How he projects at BYU: BYU recruited him as a cornerback, and that's almost certainly where he'll play. His awareness and agility, including the excellent hip fluidity, are most effectively utilized by coaches by playing him at CB. We could definitely see him on special teams as well, both as a returner and on the coverage team. There's also the possibility that we might occasionally see him used in specialty packages on offense, like we did with Dayan. He does have the ability to pass the ball in those types of packages, so it wouldn't be surprising for him to be used there occasionally him though he's primarily a CB.

Overall thoughts: This is an amazing pickup for us at cornerback. His agility and awareness are already good enough to start at the college level. If coaches can work with him at going up stronger at the ball, we could actually see him on the field on defense fairly early in his college career. If he had a bit more speed, he would have easily been a four-star recruit, as some of the other aspects of his game are already pretty much ideal. 

He also has a sort of cockiness to him that translates really well to being a college corner. You can see from his film, both by how he plays and how he chose to frame and present those clips in his film, that he fancies himself a shutdown corner. He absolutely believes that he's one, and he plays like it. If coaches can work with him on going at the ball with more strength and possibly add a little bit more speed, he has a real chance to be a shutdown corner for us as well, which is a luxury we have almost never had as a program. With most of BYU's cornerback recruits, we often see the potential to be serviceable and do their job well enough that the defense can function properly, and that's why our coaches recruited them. Harper is the rare CB recruit we got that has the potential to be incredible at the position and be an absolute game-changer for our defense. If he can reach that potential, he has the possibility to be one of the all-time greats at BYU at his position. I don't say that lightly, we rarely ever get a recruit like him at the position.