Quote:
Originally Posted by Megatron96
lol, okay. Well, you have your facts and I have mine. At the end of the day, there’s no metric that says JWat was a a significantly better WR than either JuJu or DHop, and yet he somehow still took twice as many snaps than either of those two.
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Your facts are wrong because you're ignoring the contextual reality of the season.
Yes, it is a fact that Justin Watson played more snaps than either Hopkins or Smith-Schuster.
But that isn't because the team thought he was better overall or was being stupid.
It's because:
Hopkins was acquired midseason. He played 23 snaps the week he was acquired, so throw out that outlier. He then paced for what would have been 629 snaps over the full season, despite being a mid-year add.
Smith-Schuster was a depth add who was behind the Chiefs' best WR in the pecking order to start the season, then got hurt. So the first three games of the season he was a second-string player. Then he missed, effectively, four games with a hamstring injury. By the time he was back, they had acquired Hopkins, too. Hilariously, his "healthy" games played snap total is identical to Hopkins' (629).
Watson was healthy and available all year, played 97 percent of snaps in the meaningless Week 18 game against Denver, and was a better fit for the role in the offense the injured Marquise Brown vacated. Watson's role changed when Rice went down, and it changed again when Hopkins was acquired and Smith-Schuster came back. His snap count totals were driven by his availability, injuries, and circumstance.
His pace over games 1-3 was fewer than 500 snaps.
This isn't rocket science analysis. Pretty common sense to see what his snap count totals were higher than Hopkins and Smith-Schuster.
Being mad about Watson getting more snaps than those dudes is like being mad that Kareem Hunt out-snapped Pacheco.