Stanford tight end Smith puts up video game-like receiving numbers
Kaden Smith and K.J. Costello are on the same wave length when it comes to completing passes. They’re also roommates and best friends at Stanford.
They apparently don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, though. Take their relative proficiency at the video game “Call of Duty.”
“He likes to think he’s very good,” Costello said. “He’s not very good. He’s probably the second-best in the suite — behind me.”
“We play every once in a while, and I kick his ass pretty good,” Smith said. “The girl who lives across the hall was beating him down pretty good, too.”
On the football field, tight end Smith and quarterback Costello are in perfect harmony. They know from endless repetition what the other is going to do on a pass.
In the past four games, Smith has eclipsed the 100-yard receiving mark three times, quite a feat for a tight end. He had at least eight catches and 100 yards against Utah, Washington State and Washington. The rest of the tight ends in the country have combined for only five such performances.
Smith is the first tight end to pass the 8/100 mark three times in a season since Texas Tech’s Jace Amaro in 2013. Amaro had the benefit of playing on a passhappy team.
When Smith had 112 yards against Washington State and 107 against Washington in the Cardinal’s past two games, he became the first Stanford tight end with back-to-back 100-yard games since Alex Smith did it three games in a row in 2004.
“It’s concentration,” tight ends coach Morgan Turner said of Smith’s No. 1 attribute. “No matter if there are two people running into him, a hand in his face, he just has the concentration to go up and make the play.”
For the season, Smith has 44 catches for 601 yards and two touchdowns and leads the nation’s tight ends in yards per game (66.8). Only San Jose State’s Josh Oliver (5.4 per game) averages more catches than Smith’s 4.9.
But there’s a lot more to his game than catches.
“Kaden Smith has grown immensely as a run blocker this entire year,” head coach David Shaw said.
Smith credits former Stanford tight ends Dalton Schultz and Zach Ertz, both now in the NFL, for helping him get better.
“I didn’t really trust my technique last year,” Smith said. “I was moving a little slow with it at times. Eventually, watching a lot of Dalton Schultz film and working with Dalton and Ertz this summer helped a lot.”
Blocking “means a lot to him,” Turner said of Smith. “He takes pride in that aspect of it, learning from Zach Ertz that if you can’t block, you’re not on the field as many plays.”
Turner has helped develop not only Ertz, a Pro Bowler with the Philadelphia Eagles, but also Atlanta’s Austin Hooper and Levine Toilolo, Dallas’ Schultz, Coby Fleener and the late Konrad Reuland. He thinks Smith fits very nicely in that group.
“He’s most similar to Ertz, the way he’s built and the type of athlete he is,” he said.
Smith and Costello have been pals since they attended a football camp in Oregon during high school.
“Instantly I felt he had a natural feel for the game,” Costello said. “As a quarterback you love that (in a receiver) more than talent, more than speed, more than the hands. When you can combine that with size and the hands and add speed on top of that, it helps even more.”
There’s no arguing with Smith’s hands. A few years ago, a Texas TV station reported that he had set a Guinness world record for one-handed catches in a minute with 46, breaking the mark of 33 set by New York Giants’ receiver Odell Beckham Jr. Smith’s record lasted just two weeks before a Canadian Football League player beat it.