Why is it so hard for the Eagles — and a lot of other NFL teams — to draft good wide receivers?

Gil Brandt, the Hall of Fame Dallas Cowboys player personnel executive and NFL.com senior analyst, was asked in a recent conference call with reporters about evaluating wide receivers. The first round of the NFL draft is scheduled for Thursday night, and the wideout class is said to be the deepest and most talented in recent memory. The Eagles, who hold the 21st overall pick, are in serious need of a difference-making wide receiver.

“It’s probably, next to the quarterback, percentage-wise, the highest [bust] rate of any position on the field,” Brandt said. “Why that happens, I’m not sure. I think those guys have to do a lot more things in the NFL, as far as [route] adjustments, and [they have to] do it quickly.

“The other thing is the separation. There’s a lot of guys that they can run fast, but they can’t separate.”

Eagles fans are familiar with the position’s high bust rate. Over the past few decades, they’ve seen Todd Pinkston, Freddie Mitchell, Billy McMullen, Reggie Brown, Jordan Matthews, Josh Huff, Nelson Agholor, and (at least preliminarily) 2019 second-rounder J.J. Arcega-Whiteside all fail to make the desired impact. Those receivers were all taken in the first three rounds.

The only WRs the team has hit on in the first three rounds during that span are DeSean Jackson (second round, 49th overall, 2008) and Jeremy Maclin (first round, 19th overall, 2009). Jason Avant was a quality fourth-rounder in 2006.

Eagles general manager Howie Roseman said on a recent conference call that wide receivers are more ready for the NFL now than they were a while back. But there is little evidence that the Eagles have done a better job in recent drafts of evaluating them, which Roseman also acknowledged.

“When we talk about the receiver position, what was going on 5, 10 years ago, and where these guys were raised and how they were groomed at the high school level, and the advent of seven-on-seven camps, now these guys have so much more experience in the passing game. I don’t know what was going on in 2010 is the same for evaluating the position now,” Roseman said.

“But obviously, coverages are different in the National Football League, the quality of the corner player is different, and you have these college coaches who are able to scheme up opportunities and [are] moving guys around, because in college football there’s obviously not the same level of play in the secondary.

“I think sometimes that’s been the part of the evaluation in the past that you don’t take for granted. In terms of us and what we have done, we’ve got to look at that. We’ve got to look at the guys we have brought in and the reasons that they were brought in, and the guys who had success, and who haven’t.”

There was a time when the Eagles missed on some prospects — not just at wide receiver — because they were looking at athletic potential more than how the player’s tools translated onto the field. Edge rusher Marcus Smith, their first-round pick in 2014, was an example of this, as was Huff, a converted running back, taken in that draft’s third round. Huff had little feel for the finer points of wide receiver play, and his hands weren’t great.

That draft occurred during the Chip Kelly regime. Subsequently, player personnel vice president Joe Douglas brought an emphasis on college production, before the Jets hired him away as their general manager last year. Production means a lot to Andy Weidl, Douglas’ protégé and successor, as well.

But emphasizing production isn’t some sort of magic drafting wand. Donnel Pumphrey, the undersized and underwhelming running back the Eagles took in 2017’s fourth round, proved that. Pumphrey, the NCAA’s Division I FBS all-time rushing leader with 6,405 yards on 1,059 carries, wasn’t strong enough or shifty enough to do much in the NFL.

Pumphrey wasn’t a wideout, though. What’s so hard about finding guys who can run fast and catch footballs?

If that were all that mattered, maybe it wouldn’t be hard.

NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah is a former Eagles personnel executive. On another recent conference call, Jeremiah suggested that some teams are learning to bridge the gap between college and pro wide receiver play by utilizing current college concepts, finding ways to use talented rookies even if they don’t yet know all the ins and outs.

This is something the Eagles notably did not do last season with Arcega-Whiteside, which might be part of why coach Doug Pederson presides over a revamped offensive brain trust this year.

“The challenge in scouting the position is it's almost like two different games for college and the NFL, in terms of what routes you're asked to run, which are very limited at the college level,” Jeremiah said. “You watch a college game on a Saturday, you're going to see a bunch of slants, hitches-and-goes. It's very limited in terms of what they ask them to do, very limited in terms of them having to read coverage and sight-adjust their routes.

“They don’t see very much press coverage, so they don’t have to get off press. Now you’re bringing them to the NFL, you’re asking them to get off press coverage, you’re asking them to think on the move, and you’re asking them to run a lot of routes they’ve never run before.

“There's a lot of adjustment there, but I think — I give the NFL credit. I think the last couple years we're seeing the NFL be a little smarter with the transition period for these guys, and figuring out ways they can get them on fly sweeps or bubble screens, and just get the ball in their hands and let them make plays, simplifying it a little bit while they're young, before they can grow and evolve into everything you want them to do.”

Let’s choose one member from this touted wide receiver class at random. Let’s say we’ve chosen Brandon Aiyuk, 6-feet, 205 pounds, from Arizona State, projected as a late-first-round, early-second-round selection by many draft experts. Aiyuk underwent core-muscle surgery April 7 after hearing that NFL teams would like to see him resolve this issue and start healing before the draft. He said this week he has seen a lot of interest from the Eagles. We’ve called up a highlight video on YouTube. What do we see?

In the first clip, Aiyuk is lined up outside, near the left sideline. The Oregon corner covering him, a junior named Deommodore Lenoir, sets up about 12 yards off the line. Aiyuk takes off, gives Lenoir a nod of a fake inside, slowing Lenoir as Aiyuk — his release unimpeded — streaks past. Boom, 81-yard touchdown.

The next highlight is a screen pass that Aiyuk takes to the house. The third is a punt-return touchdown. Then Aiyuk breaks some tackles on a kickoff return. Then he catches a goal-line slant.

We see a great athlete. We don’t see tight coverage, double coverage, a contested catch. We don’t see any sort of route adjustment, or route complexity. That doesn’t mean Aiyuk isn’t capable of these things. It does mean that projecting him into an NFL offense isn’t the easiest thing ever.

“It's become a space game and it's become a game of matchups and spreading people out, receivers that can win on all three levels early, top of the route, and guys that can stretch the field,” Weidl said on the Roseman conference call. “It's become a one-on-one league and a space game, and [favors] guys that can win and guys that can go above the rim and play the football.”

Arcega-Whiteside was supposed to be one of those above-the-rim types — he specialized in contested catches at Stanford, finished his career second in school history in receiving touchdowns, with 28. Maybe he still will be that. Or maybe, as was the case with Pumphrey, the fact that he could win against college defenders doesn’t mean he can do it in the NFL.

Arcega-Whiteside was a “production” guy — 135 career receptions for 2,219 yards in 33 Stanford games over three seasons. He was drafted 19 spots before Washington took Ohio State wideout Terry McLaurin. McLaurin caught 58 passes for 919 yards and seven touchdowns as a rookie. Arcega-Whiteside caught 10 for 169 yards and one touchdown.

McLaurin was not a production guy. In four years at Ohio State, playing alongside some of the most talented players in college football, he caught just 75 career passes for 1,251 yards and 19 touchdowns. This year, Alabama’s top two receivers, Jerry Jeudy and Henry Ruggs III, are expected to be drafted in the first half of the first round; Ruggs caught just 40 passes in 2019, for 746 yards and seven touchdowns.

This sort of thing threatens to become more common as more and more top prospects flock to the top programs, knowing that if it doesn’t work out, they can just hit the transfer portal and start over. It makes focusing on production problematic.

“We talked about it at some point this offseason, about the fact that it was surprising to us, just going back and how much we value production, about the success that some of the guys had last year coming into the NFL and being productive right away,” Roseman said. “We’ve got to look at that stuff, and we have got to learn from it and make sure we do whatever we can to add talent to our team.”

The wide receiver class in this draft features a little bit of everything — speedy guys, savvy route-runners, contested-catch types. It will be interesting to look back in 10 years and see who turned out to be as good as hyped, who wasn’t, and who was not a great draft prospect but was a great pro. Carson Wentz’s future might hang on how the Eagles handle this draft. No pressure, or anything.