Penn State WR DaeSean Hamilton: ‘I have great play speed’

DaeSean Hamilton didn’t run the 40-yard dash at the recent NFL Scouting Combine, saving that event for his March 20 Pro Day at Penn State.

Hamilton isn’t concerned about the one question some scouts have about the sort of impact he’ll make at the next level — a lack of elite speed — because as far as he’s concerned, he’s fast enough.

‘When I run at my Pro Day, I expect to run anywhere in the 4.5s’

And it’s something that he knows NFL talent-evaluators will see in studying videotape.

“Obviously, I have great play speed,” Hamilton told Vic Carucci and Dan Leberfeld on Press Coverage. “You can see that on film. You can see that really in any of the games that they’ve watched in this past season or any time in my career. Then, obviously, when I run at my Pro Day, I expect to run anywhere in the 4.5s, obviously lower than higher.”

The rules included doing homework, at the kitchen table, the moment he came home from school

With both parents who are Marines, Hamilton said it was “pretty strict growing up” in his household. The rules included doing homework, at the kitchen table, the moment he came home from school and before he did anything else, including going to “get some food or just go hang out in my room.” In elementary and middle school, there was no texting after 10 p.m. If he missed curfew, he would have his phone and/or his car keys taken away.

Hamilton credits the disciplined upbringing, along with the guidance of Penn State receivers coach Josh Gattis, with having plenty to do with one of his greatest strengths: precise route-running.

‘Sometimes, before practice, we wouldn’t touch a football until we did about 10 minutes of blocking drills’

“(Gattis) basically coached us all the same way,” Hamilton said. “He made sure that we all paid attention to the little details and we mastered our craft for everything that we’re doing, whether that would be blocking. Sometimes, before practice, we wouldn’t touch a football until we did about 10 minutes of blocking drills. And then we go onto perfecting the little details in the routes — foot placement, jabs, hand-fighting, things like that. We were repetitive at it every single day.

“And I took that as my base line, my blueprint for how I’m going to work based off of those things, and realized what I was good at in my early years of college and I just started developing on that and I work on that day after day. Plenty of times in the offseason, I would go and I would do a lot of extra work on top of our team workouts.”