Receiving Stats

Here are the best percentages of passes dropped for receivers through week nine:

1. Travis Benjamin, Cleveland Browns: 0%
2. Keenan Allen, San Diego Chargers: 1.5%
3. Larry Fitzgerald, Arizona Cardinals: 1.8%
4. Steve Smith Sr., Baltimore Ravens: 2.1%
5. Brandin Cooks, New Orleans Saints: 2.2%

The #1 objective of all receivers is to catch passes. It all starts there. It's simply amazing that not every receiver gets that. Congratulations to the above receivers for doing their jobs. Special congratulations to Travis Benjamin for doing his job perfectly. It's a damn shame that Keenan Allen and Steve Smith Sr. are on the injury shelf for the season. Their pass catching skills will be sorely missed. By their teams and by fans of good football. It's especially great to see Allen catching passes so successfully. In his three years at Cal he had an occasional tendency to run before he'd secured the ball. He was such a superior athlete to the defenders tasked with stopping him that he was often seemed to be in a hurry to get by them. That impatience resulted in some drops. It's good to see that he's left that bad habit back in college. It has always been a treat to watch Larry Fitzgerald catch a football.

Now, for the other side of the pass catching stat sheet...

Here are the worst percentages of passes dropped for receivers through week nine:

Ted Ginn Jr., Carolina Panthers: 25%
Mike Evans, Tampa Bay Buccaneers: 17.9%
Nate Washington, Houston Texans: 16.1%
Amari Cooper, Oakland Raiders: 13.5%
Julian Edelman, New England Patriots: 12.3%
Rishard Matthews, Miami Dolphins: 9.8%

This is pathetic. No NFL receiver should drop a quarter of the passes thrown to him. No receiver at any level of football should be dropping that many footballs. Ted Ginn Jr. was damn lucky that his drop of a perfectly thrown Cam Newton deep pass against the Indianapolis Colts didn't result in his team's first loss of the season. Sometimes a drop happens. It shouldn't. But it happens. For Ginn it's happening far too often. For all of the above receivers it's happening far too often. Two games ago, Mike Evans dropped six passes. That nearly equaled the total of eight that he managed to catch. No receiver had drop six passes in a single game in the last ten years. It reminded me of the pass-catching challenges that Terrell Owens faced every week. Amari Cooper has been fantastic in his rookie season but his drops have to stop.

Those receivers on the bottom should spend some time watching some tape of the receivers on the top. Pull up any Arizona Cardinals tape from the years in which Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin were on the field together. That was a beautiful, weekly pass-catching tutorial. Or, tape of Cris Carter. It doesn't get better than that.