ESPN.com: ASU’s D.J. Foster NCAA’s 84th-best player

ASU lost their top wide receiver from 2014 in Jaelen Strong to the NFL Draft, but will replace him with someone that ESPN’s college football writers think is one of the top 100 players in the country.

ESPN.com’s staff of football writers selected ASU senior D.J. Foster as the 84^th-best player in the country in their annual preseason player rankings.

T-84. D.J. Foster
Arizona State Sun Devils
Senior | Receiver/running back
Score: 6.67

He earned second-team All-Pac-12 honors as running back in 2014, and he has the most rushing yards and touchdowns in the conference among returning players. Yet he’s so versatile that he will be the Sun Devils’ starting slot receiver this fall, only moonlighting as a guy taking handoffs. As it is, he owns 2,075 yards rushing and 17 touchdowns piled up over three years, including 1,122 yards last season. He’s no novice catching the ball, either. He’s piled up 113 receptions for 1,834 yards with 11 touchdowns in his career, and he is a particular favorite target of Sun Devils quarterback Mike Bercovici. In the four games Bercovici started or in which he saw significant action last fall, Foster caught 24 of his 62 passes for 293 of his 688 yards.

The player’s “score” is the average ranking on a scale of 0-10 based on what the expected contributions are for the player next season.

Foster will be transitioning from running back to wide receiver this season after being the team’s second-leading receiver in 2014. He is the only active FBS player with more than 1,500 rushing and 1,500 receiving yards for his career.

The 5-foot-11, 195-pound wide receiver has caught a pass in each of his 40 career games as a Sun Devil.

The former Saguaro High School (Scottsdale, Ariz.) star joins fellow Pac-12 stars in Stanford’s Kyle Murphy (81^st), Oregon’s Tyler Johnstone (84), Oregon’s Charles Nelson (91) and UCLA’s Eddie Vanderdoes (95) among players listed so far.