Auden Tate: Where to play him

[Whatever]

(12-31-2019, 11:31 AM)Au165 Wrote: This isn't based in fact what so ever. He get's 10 inches less separation that Tyler Boyd. The difference is their average depth of target is over 3 yards different with Tate having much deeper average depth of targets. That difference in average depth of target leads to a full point difference in target quality rating from Boyd to Tate (scores ball placement, 6 is average Tate's was 4.4 Boyd's was 5.5). What is interesting is Dalton's target rating as a whole was 7.4, but was heavily bolstered by shorter passes where he was far above league average in accuracy and then fell off a cliff as he got deeper down the field.

Basically, what the actual data shows us is that Tate was thrown a lot of horrible balls that were uncatchable downfield. When they were catchable however he came down with an insanely high rate of them. His separation is really not any worse than Tyler Boyd (who has a really good contested catch rate BTW), but Boyd benefited from more accurately thrown balls at a shorter depth of target.

GPS measurements on seperation do not translate to "open".  If you're running a comeback route and the defender is 1 yard behind you, you're open.  If he's one yard in front of you, you're not.  It's a tool, but doesn't give anything close to the full picture.  As you pointed out later, Boyd's targets are typically closer to the LoS, where there are more defenders and he has less time to generate seperation.  

The target distance argument also completely falls apart because of the red zone.  Tate caught only 5 of 14 red zone targets for 35 yards and 1 TD.  If it was a target distance issue, we would see a trend similar to Ross last year where he had a high catch rate in the red zone, but a poor catch rate between the 20's.  With Tate, the opposite is true.