Quote:
Originally Posted by Chiefnj2
Juju seemed to catch more downfield passes. It seems like Rice is making most of his catches on screens. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what it seems like. JuJu was used differently.
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The playcalling is reminiscent of the year KC went an entire season without a WR touchdown. For as brilliant as Reid is, there are times this year when it is absolutely baffling how they cant design a few plays a week to get Toney in space on a drag or slant. Not to have a single target to Toney or Watson this past week is criminal.
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I mean technically he did catch a few more passes 'downfield' but it depends on your definition of same.
JuJu caught 18 passes more than 10 yards downfield all season (none more than 20). Rice so far has caught 7.
JuJu ran 528 routes last season; Rice has run 245. You go ahead and pro-rate Rice's routes run to JuJu's 528 and you're looking at 15 catches more than 10 yards downfield vs. JuJu's 18. There's no notable difference there. That's 3 balls over a full season - that's not going to move the needle at all.
Now when I say it depends on how you define 'downfield' - Rice has already caught 17 balls behind the LOS vs only 6 for Rashee. And it ain't the deep balls where that gap is closing. Where you're seeing the difference is that Rice isn't catching nearly as many balls from 0-9 yards as JuJu did (63 vs. 28). So it isn't really that JuJu caught more 'downfield' passes than Rice does unless you count short passes just past the LOS (0-9 yards) as being 'downfield'.
But here's why I say this is an opportunity rather than ability issue - again, if you double Rice's routes to get to where JuJu ended up, then suddenly he's almost identical in short catches past the LOS to where JuJu was. Moreover, Rice has a 120 passer rating when targeted on those short passes whereas JuJu had a 103.
Additionally, JuJu ran 254 'short' (0-9) routes for a total of 613 yards receiving - 2.41 yards/RR. Thus far Rice has run 95 'short' routes for 300 yards receiving -- 3.16 yards/RR. And for both guys, the bulk of their work is over the middle (though Rice over the middle has actually been a pretty significant upgrade - short middle has 210 yards for Rice over 58 routes run vs. 328 yards over 143 for JuJu).
I mean the short answer is simply that the only difference between what Rice and JuJu have done this year is volume just past the LOS and short of 10 yards. And that if that were to equalize at all, Rice would just strafe JuJu across the board.
We aren't missing JuJu. We simply aren't using Rice the way we should. He is proving to be extremely efficient in every area of the field (except the deep ball) and we're simply not utilizing him the way we could/should.
And it's been a trend. We're doing that with Toney as well. We're doing that with James. Meanwhile we're over-exposing Watson, MVS and Moore and asking them to do shit like slot fades that they simply aren't equipped for.
I really don't understand how we can continue to see some of these figures and say the offense is exclusively a product of poor WRs - we simply don't know because we aren't USING these guys in a way that gets their best work out of them. The problem is, and has been all year, the way we're rotating and utilizing our WRs. Until we put them in positions to succeed and capitalize on their strengths, we can't know if they truly suck. But I know with Rice and the numbers under the hood, you can see he's CLEARLY been criminally underutilized.
We aren't missing JuJu - we're simply not using Rice the way we should. He can bring all the things that JuJu brought but we continue to slow-play him.