Patsfanin Philly said:
I like the fact that 58 of his 71 catches went for first downs (over 80%) which is much higher thna a lot of other receivers. I wanted to compare it to you know who and he's not listed on the nfl.com players page. Weird......
By the way, 31 of those first downs for Gabriel were last year.
For Branch (sorry if its hard to read):
2003 New England 15 57 803 53.5 14.1 66 4.4 40 3 0 0 0.0 0 0 4 26 6.5 11 0 0 0
2004 New England 9 35 454 50.4 13.0 26 4.1 27 4 0 0 0.0 0 0 1 0 0.0 0 0 0 0
2005 New England 16 78 998 62.4 12.8 51 3.1 51 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
That's 51 of 78 receptions
last year for first downs, plus 26 in 04 and 66 in 03.
In other words, they're both catching balls that move the chains, just Branch is catching many more. This is not replacing Branch (although Doug G. might have the potential to, with nothing like a Randy Moss or a Jerry Rice to compete with,) but it certainly doesn't hurt.
The kid could play. He's a starter on a team with better talent at WR, who could afford to offload him; you know he's a starter for us (sorry Bam, or whoever.)
What's not to like? We get another little piece to wedge into the puzzle. That's the name of the game, how it all fits together. To me, this says one thing (based on size and speed,) which is that -- if he can indeed get past a corner -- he gives you the legitimate deep threat. Oh yeah Caldwell can get open too... but from what I've seen Caldwell considers the job done by virtue of being open, and leaves off that bit at the end where you catch the ball.
Fix
that, get Jackson's hammy healed, and we have enough of a receiving corps (
not "core") to open up a can of Ben Watson on other team's safeties and/or linebackers.
As long as we don't end up with the box stacked against our run -- just like teams felt free to disregard the run and cover the pass last year -- we'll have a balanced enough attack to make good on the Branch decision. And the more I see about Branch, the more I like the decision in his regard.
PFnV
