Quote:
Originally Posted by DenverChief
I'm pretty sure most of the offensive kinks will be ironed out by next week Andy and Pat are going to make sure of that.
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Oh. No. Just no.
This isn't some sit-com, where every problem is solved neatly in a half hour weekly episode. this isn't going to get fixed by next week.
As some of us noted last season, this is a problem that's been going on for awhile. And it's obviously still a real problem.
Getting Travis back will hide a lot of these issues, yes. And I won't be surprised if the offense looks competent, even good, when he does get back on the field, because Travis receives so much attention from defenses that some WR/RB just pops wide the **** open on a fairly regular basis.
But again, our WRs spent a ton of snaps just not getting open. Any of them. go back and look at that cutup someone posted. It's not good.
How many times does Pat hit his back foot, his hands separate in anticipation of throwing the ball on time, and then he has to reload and start looking for another receiver? At least a half dozen times in the first half alone. I stopped counting after that. And at least 4 times in just the first half he had to take off and run for the sticks. Considering that Pat only averages 2-3 scrambles like that per game for his career is just another indicator of a problem.
Now, in defense of the WRs, there was at least a couple times that a WR did come open and Pat missed him, or he threw a poor pass, or he was late throwing the ball.
But mostly the WRs as a unit couldn't get open on those snaps. And there were too many of them. I knew it was a problem when Pat took off on his 3rd run of the first half, as I'm sure many others did. Didn't even have to see the look of annoyance on Pat's face to see that.
Look, Skyy is still having trouble deciphering what to do/where to settle in zone. As some young WRs do in the NFL. We've seen guys take a couple full seasons (sometimes more) to figure out zone. We hope that it doesn't take Skyy until the end of this season, but right now that's his level of competence vs. zone.
MVS did in fact get open a couple times downfield and Pat just missed seeing him. But mostly, MVS is just who he is.
James . . . way back when we first picked him up, some analyst called him "decent rotational depth." Well, after watching him struggle last night, that may have been a more accurate assessment of Richie than we knew. Oh, and please take him off return duties.
Justin Watson played a decent game. But the fact that Watson was our 2nd leading WR is not a good sign.
Nothing really to say about Rice/Ross. Effectively they're both rooks, so in that regard, they were fine.
And Toney had a terrible game catching the ball. I think after the 2nd drop it really got into his head and shit just fell off a cliff after that. He did get open fairly regularly, something the rest of the WRs struggled with, but KT also ran some poor routes as well. Regardless, KT had a shitty game. Fortunately, we know he can play much better than he did last night, so probably that was an outlier performance, and he'll bounce back just fine.
But overall, that's a lot of problems in one room. We aren't fixing that in a week.
I said after the draft that it could take a couple months for this group to get squared away. Didn't see anything last night to change my mind about how long it might take for these guys to get their shit figured out.