Hakeem Butler looks like a pretty exceptional WR.
As I
wrote about earlier, it's rare for a WR to be both a high volume and high efficiency player, but Butler (and Isabella) pulled it off this year. Butler's 12.2 YPT was 10th in the country, and his 42% market share of his team's receiving yards was 5th in the country, and his 101 receiving yards per game (or 1318 total receiving yards) were 9th in the country. Defenses knew that Butler was the guy to stop, and he was still able to keep putting up big plays on them. Put these together with his other stats, and my formula has Butler as the most productive receiver this year, narrowly beating out Isabella and Hall.
Butler is also huge,
estimated at 6'4.8" 225 lbs. I posted
a few days ago about how big WRs have been overrepresented among superstars. A slightly different way to carve things up is to look at WRs who both were big and had reasonably good college production. If we use 6'4" and 210 lbs. as the cutoff for big (excluding the skinny guys like Justin Hunter as well as the not-very-tall) and use a career production score of 4.0 as the cutoff for good college production (which is roughly the cutoff that my WR rating formula has, insofar as it has something like a "cutoff", on a scale where 0 is average and Butler has a 10.5), then Butler is (likely to become) the 8th WR since 2006 who qualifies. Ranked by college production, they are:
Danario Alexander Missouri 2010 (6'4.6", 215 lbs.)
Mike Evans Texas A&M 2014 (6'4.8", 231 lbs.)
Hakeem Butler Iowa State 2019 (est. 6'4.8", 225 lbs.)
Stephen Hill Ga Tech 2012 (6'4.0", 215 lbs.)
James Hardy Indiana 2008 (6'5.4", 217 lbs.)
Maurice Stovall Notre Dame 2006 (6'5", 217 lbs.)
Calvin Johnson Georgia Tech 2007 (6'5", 239 lbs.)
Brandon Marshall Central Florida 2006 (6'4.5", 229 lbs.)
That's 3/7 studs, which is a pretty good hit rate, and within this group Butler is 3rd in production, tied for 4th in height, and 4th in weight - average or better. Some of these guys did have other strong signs about whether they'd be NFL stars which aren't captured here - Calvin Johnson's amazing athleticism, Stephen Hill's horrible hands, Danario Alexander's knee problems; that still leaves a couple stars (Evans & Marshall) and a couple busts (Hardy & Stovall). Pretty good company for Butler.
I think the biggest negative sign for Butler is the combination of his age and one-year-wonderness. His May 1996 birthday makes him one of the older WRs in this class, about a year older than average, and it's presumably easier to put up big numbers when you're a man among boys (bigger and older than most other players). At ages 20 and 21 he didn't do all that much on the field, with just 41/697/7 in 13 games in 2017 - if he's so talented, why couldn't he do more than that?
Another negative is that he wasn't much of a red zone threat, despite his size. This year he had just 2 red zone TDs; granted the Iowa State offense didn't make it to the red zone all that often, but 2 red zone receiving TDs is not in the top 100 and his 2/9 market share of team red zone receiving teams is also below average. Though I didn't watch the tape - maybe he was getting double teamed a lot?
But on the whole Butler's profile is extremely impressive, and if I had to rank WRs without seeing other experts' evaluations then I'd probably have him at #2 behind AJ Brown.