JoeSixPat
Pro Bowl Player
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- Nov 8, 2004
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"The use of Stallworth" argument is kind of mystifiying to me, perhaps you or someone else can explain it?
For one, I don't consider him to be a "proven" wide receiver in our offense at all. He's been here one year and - correct me if I'm wrong - speculation was he lost considerable amounts of playing time to Gaffney late in the year because Gaffney understood the offense better.
He also had, by and large, a similar season statistically this year to other seasons where he's been the primary threat on the outside.
All in all, I don't see the argument for his misuse in our offense. You can only send so many people deep on a given play, and Moss is probably a better deep target - and from the way he was spoken of and used, likely understood the offense much better than Stallworth.
To save you the trouble of reading swears and insults in this thread from Deus, let me recap:
Look at the course of the season - we start out and Moss is largely a monster, and the Patriots are blowing out opponents by 24 points with the offense on fire...
Then watch the evolution of the season as defenders realize that any concerns they had about Stallworth and Moss serving as joint deep threats - which would have limited their ability to double team Moss because they would have been burned deep by Stallworth - was unfounded.
As noted, Stallworth - who averaged 19 yards per catch the previous season in Philly - was used about as much as a deep threat as Reche Caldwell was in 2006, to give you the impression of how under utilized he was (and if the excuse is that it was his first year in our system, does that apply to Moss too?)
The trend of using Moss and only Moss as a deep WR contiued, with defenders often doing a pretty good job taking away our deep game, with McDaniels never adjusting - seemingly content to let defenders limit Moss, and thereby limit the deep game.
So WHY would an OC, who has two proven deep threats on the team, choose NOT to one of them when he needed to? As Deus pointed out there was no shortage of short yardage WRs.
Does allowing teams to take away our deep game somehow BENEFIT the team? Of course not. Does it hurt the team? I'd say yes, and the increasingly tight games as the season wore on, culminating in the loss in the Super Bowl, would generally back me up.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not blaming the Super Bowl loss solely on the season long refusal to use Stallworth as a deep threat... and I don't think anyone should look at just one game and draw conclusions about an OC's entire season. But it is, shall we say puzzling that we had TWO deep threat WRs but really only used one the entire season.
When you have the talent but choose not to call plays that best utilize that talent - and choose not to call plays that counter the moves of a defense - playcalling does indeed come into question.
Now Deus views Gaffney as a good deep threat - and apparently Reche Caldwell as a good deep threat as well, because he doesn't even bother trying to refute the similar stats in the deep game both players had. Deus also is fond of pointing out that teams that finished well behind the Patriots also had similar deep WR stats - not realizing apparently that the Bengals didn't exactly finish with the strongest record, thereby proving my point.
I'm sure McDaniels, if he's reading this, probably feels he can do without "friends" like Deus Irae supporting him... hopefully he'll refrain from offering his opinion on Spygate as well