If You Don't Love Rondale Moore, There's The Door
You're either with us or against us
Back in 2018, the No. 2 ranked Ohio State football team visited Purdue as 14-point favorites. The Buckeyes had a 7-0 record heading into the match-up, while Purdue was 3-3, with one of those losses coming to Eastern Michigan. As a lifelong OSU fan, I was watching that night, expecting an easy victory.
As it turned out, it was an easy victory… for Purdue, who shitcanned Ohio State 49-20. While this served as another example of an Ohio State choke-job, the bigger story for me was a wide receiver who basically won the game single-handedly for Purdue. His name was Rondale Moore, a true freshman at the time. He ended the game with 12 catches for 170 yards and two touchdowns.
Obviously those are eye-popping numbers, but even they don’t do the performance justice. I had seen Ohio State get inexplicably shredded by various WRs over the years, giving up box score-busting stats in a number of different ways. But what Rondale Moore did that night was just different. It was a “Who the hell is that guy?” type performance.
Early on when Moore flashed some playmaking ability, I remember Chris Fowler immediately talking him up: “An electrifying returner!” “The freshman has blazing speed!” “A juggling catch, the whole skillset on display.” You could sense something was in the air. They even started talking about how much he could squat, which is NEVER good.
The dude simply took over that night, eventually capping the game by taking a swing pass 43 yards for a score, barreling through multiple Buckeyes on the way.
Truth be told, I really didn’t even give care about the embarrassing loss for Ohio State. I was too intrigued by this true freshman.
Flash forward two and a half years, and Rondale Moore is entering the NFL draft following two seasons where he wasn’t on the field much. This, combined with his 5’9” stature, is apparently creating some hesitation within the fantasy football and NFL draft communities. I can’t tell you how excited that makes me.
I hope more and more people doubt Rondale, because I know what I saw that night: true #specialness in the making. I’ll let all the experts out there dissect him this way and that way. I’m just going to keep drafting him far ahead of ADP. I’m already 2-2 in best ball drafts this offseason. He’s exactly the type of dude I want to bet on.
There is certainly hype in some areas of the fantasy football community, most notably from Ray Garvin (@RayGQue), who knows Moore personally. Still, from my perspective, Rondale Moore is being underappreciated by the general public.
I’ll let the hardcore analysts like Ray and others break down all the metrics and in-depth info you should know on Moore (maybe, IDK, how he squats more than 600 pounds). But for my purposes here, I just want to say that anyone who’s even REMOTELY skeptical of Rondale Moore, now’s your chance to get your shit straight, get on the right side of history, and get in line for the Rondale Moore party. Because it’s coming.
-Josh