I found 4 full game cut-ups of Pollard. He seemed a bit off early in the Houston game with some drops. Other than that, I saw 1 drop in the other 3 games.
Despite some drops early in the Houston game, his stats for that game:
Att ......: 11
Yds ....: 83
Avg ....: 7.5
TD …..: 1
Rec ….: 8
Yds ….: 116
Avg ….: 14.5
I'm curious about your "bad routes" comment. Can you give me a couple of examples? I'm not saying it didn't happen, but in that offense with the way they use him, I'm not sure how you determined he was running bad routes.
Where Pollard is really elite is in the transition from catch to run on those short routes in the flat or on the smoke routes where he catches at the line with no forward movement and then accelerates after the catch.
Many NFL RBs struggle with the process of having their head turned back to the QB while running in the flat and then transitioning to running after the catch. Just the slightest delay in that process can be the difference in multiple yards gained vs minimal.
Side Note:
His teammate RB Darrell Henderson was my favorite RB in this draft.
The draft media claimed that Henderson is too small to be a full time lead-back. Henderson is 5-8, 208. Barry Sanders was 5-8, 200 and Emmitt was 5-9, 208 (draft weight).
I agree on Henderson. While watching Pollard, Henderson definitely popped off the screen at me, not sure why he wasn't held in better regard - being 5-9 at RB doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
Also agree that Pollard is at his best taking short catches and then accelerating, which is kind of my point. If people are thinking of him as a "slot receiver", I don't believe that's where he made his bones at Memphis. As you said, he was catching mostly flats and screens and getting YAC.
I can't go find time stamps right now, but when I say "bad routes", I mean that when he was running actual routes, he tended to round routes off or barely run them at all - especially if he knew the ball wasn't coming to him, which is almost never did when he lined up as a receiver. He doesn't set up his moves, never ran double moves, couldn't/didn't accelerate off the line quickly enough to stack a DB, etc.
I don't fault him for any of that, there's a reason he wasn't just a receiver.
What I did like is that even though he's not the greatest blocker in the world, he was pretty fearless and it's probably why he was on the field so much in those 2 HB sets and why those short passes to him were productive because it wasn't like he only came in to catch the ball.