KC: Looking at
Dak Prescott, he averaged 9.8 vertical yards per attempt in 2017. That’s not a good number for vertical passes. That ranked 25th last year. Those only accounted for 27% of his total passes. That’s also a very low number. That’s 30th. He just didn’t air it out very often. That’s a lower percentage of deep attempts than guys like Alex Smith, or Kirk Cousins. That’s even fewer than
Blake Bortles. Part of it is that
Dez Bryant had abysmal metrics last year. He had atrocious metrics, so much so that I think he alone crippled the vertical passing game. He ranked next to last out of 86 qualifying wide receivers in vertical yards per attempt, this is passes more than eleven yards downfield. Only Zay Jones, who had one of the worst seasons I’ve ever seen a starting receiver with heavy targets have since I’ve been doing this was worse, and
Dez Bryant was only a half step ahead of him.
Bryant ranked 70th in stretch yards per attempt at 7.8 on passes, those thrown 20 or more yards down the field. We talked about the fortune points metric. With offensive fortune points, which is how often you lost points to bad luck on your part – you dropped a pass, he lost 39.5 points in PPR fantasy leagues which is an incredibly high number. I’m looking up the specifics on his fortune points. If we’re talking vertical passes, and that’s why you pay Dez Bryant the money, for vertical production. You don’t hire the guy to catch short passes. He had 26 plays in 2017 where there was some sort of bad luck or error, for the whole season. Thirteen of those were short passes, under ten yards downfield. That’s not good but if you’re dropping short passes the team can deal with that.
Here he is on vertical attempts on throws eleven or more yards downfield. Of those thirteen plays, eight were straight up drops on his part. And the ninth was an inaccurate pass that he dropped. You can put that one on the QB. The other four were inaccurate passes. And one of those that I graded as inaccurate because the rush affected the throw. The other three were misses by Dak. And the thing is, of those thirteen passes, eleven of them were in the medium range, eleven to nineteen yards downfield. Only two were deep, 20 to 29 yards. None were over 30-yard attempts, that I call bomb pass attempts. What does that say to me if I’m looking at it? Why didn’t he have more misses in the deeper ranges? It’s because he wasn’t getting open...
http://profootballtalkline.com/nfl-...ed-the-cowboys-2017-deep-passing-attack.html/
Now, who was it that figured that part out and put into effect a different scheme with new players to execute? What is the denominator of change for this group of receivers?
Have to drill hard.
