06-09-2020, 12:51 PM
(06-09-2020, 01:52 AM)Au165 Wrote: Let's start off that catch percentage is a horrible stat to use. If the ball is reasonably catchable or not, it doesn't matter, you get credited with a target. Let's look at "true catch rate" where only catchable balls are taken into account. Auden Tate had a 75.5% true catch rate while Mike Williams was 74.2% and Kenny Golladay 75.6%. So they all catch about the same amount on catchable balls, and they all have about the same amount of separation. I will say Golladay is an elite contested ball catcher (7th in NFL) whereas (Williams 24th) and Tate (20th) are just really good. Tate's target quality score was 97th in the NFL, whereas Williams was 20th and Golladay was 23rd meaning they simply had better situations, which is my whole point.
When you start throwing out cliches about “slow to get into the route and out of breaks” and then talking about timing throws and how they “can’t throw inside or it’s a pick 6” without even talking about the specific nuances of a particular route, or coverage, I can’t actually take you seriously. Go find a mash-up of him consistently “getting into his route and out of his breaks too slow”. Go watch back the Buffalo tape against a really good Tre'Davious White and show me where this is occuring. These over-generalizations don't actually mean anything, especially if you can't put tape to it. This is stuff you see on scouting reports as generalizations but it
On the tape my biggest issue with him was that he can sometimes round out his out route, but that is relatively common. Rounding off an out can change ball placement but it should usually be high and behind there not wide, he saw a lot of really wide balls. My biggest issue with his QB play was simply throwing the ball outside the field of play. Often times he would do a good job on a 9 ball getting up the field and hold the leverage to prevent getting squeeze to the sideline. He gives his QB's the proper spacing on the sideline to work with but they (usually Dalton) still wanted to put the ball too far outside. His best route is his slant. The thing he does well is his use of suddenness at the top of his steam to get inside positioning on corners. The key with the slant is attacking the ball when it's thrown rather than letting it get to your chest. He goes and snatches the ball out of the air with his hands, which helps beat tighter man coverage, especially on properly placed balls. When balls are thrown on a WR's numbers on these routes or on the back hip, that is where people tend to cry about "lack of separation" but that's not where that ball is supposed to be in most situations unless you are throwing into an oncoming zone defender.
I defend him because I’ve watched all 80 targets of his last season. Was he amazing? No. Was he better than people here think? 100%. There is a difference between getting a ball to a guy and getting him the ball where it’s supposed to be. There are different ball placements used for protecting receivers from defenders, and throwing them open, but more often then not Tate found himself simply with bad balls. He can be a high-end #2 WR in this league.
So, you keep harping on target quality, but a 70 some slot difference in target quality equated to a 4-6% difference on catch % using your sample players. That would've equated to 4 more catches and 50-some yards over the course of last year. He would not have had this massive jump in production with similar target quality. We're talking one more catch every 3 games.
His inability to get out of his breaks is obvious on his tape. Watch all the times he struggles to get to the boundary on his out routes and tell me he gets out of his breaks well.
Rounding off an out on the boundary is not going to cause a high and behind throw. The QB is throwing to a spot on the sideline. The receiver is supposed to break after a set number of steps and his route is supposed to intersect the ball's trajectory just before the chalk. Most commonly, WR's that round off their out carry the route too far upfield. That results in throws that seem wide because the ball went oob a yard or two in front of him.
Draw an X and Y axis. Pick a point on X and and a point on Y and draw a line between them, continuing the line past the Y axis. Now pick a point slightly further up the Y axis and look where your line is relative to the new point. The "ball" is "out of bounds", right? You're blaming the QB for Tate's poor route running.
