Ziegler: Wilson Has Cleared Just One of Many Hurdles

The Las Vegas Raiders and General Manager Dave Ziegler are glad to have first-round pick Tyree Wilson out on the field, but understand there's more obstacles ahead.

Las Vegas Raiders first-round pick Tyree Wilson has finally been able to get some training camp experience since being cleared to participate in his first NFL practices.

While it was a long road for the young edge rusher to get to this point, the rest of the way certainly won't be getting any easier.

Raiders General Manager Dave Ziegler stressed that understanding when he addressed the media Thursday.

"[I]t's been good to get him [Wilson] out there," Ziegler said. "And he worked really hard in the rehab process. Our athletic training staff led by Chris Cortez has done a really good job of kind of laying out for us, here’s how the process is going to go, here's why it's going to go this way and taking some baby steps or incremental steps here along the way to be patient and make sure when he got out in the field, he was ready to go. Three practices into playing in the NFL, and he's practicing against a bunch of guys who have had a bunch of practices under their belt. And so, there's going to be that learning curve. 

"But he's long, he's explosive, he's fast. Now, he just needs to learn how to play from a technique standpoint at the NFL level and understand he's still learning the scheme and what the calls mean. There's a hurdle that he went over to get on the field, and now there's 1, 2, 3, 4 more hurdles in terms of learning how to play the run, learning how to play certain pass defenses, the line game stunts, twists, all that stuff. So, he's got a lot to do. He's got a lot of work to do here in front of them, but we're obviously excited to have him out on the field."

The Raiders selected Wilson with the seventh overall pick of this year's NFL Draft.

The Silver and Black open the regular season at the Denver Broncos on Sunday, September 10, at 4:25 p.m. EDT/1:25 p.m. PDT.

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