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wv ram
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zn
In fact, I personally think that any time anyone tries to discuss Tavon purely as a receiver, they're just going the wrong direction. He isn't that---there are a lot of pure receiver skills he just doesn't have. So you can't evaluate him as a pure WR, IMO, which in turn means you kind of have to see him for what he is (a multiple weapon who runs and catches and you use him all over the formation). I think McVay gets that, or it appears so anyway.
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Well, i think you can criticize him or Snead for the fact he's 'not' a pure receiver. I mean
you can say Gee why did they draft a little guy without pure receiving skills? Thats fair criticism to me.
But yeah, it apparent now he is not a pure receiver and he needs to be
used in other ways.
Frankly i was most disappointed in his special teams play last year. Where was the electricity?
An awful team. Just awful. Did anyone play well on offense?
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I don't criticize them for that. I like what they did with Tavon in 2015. The fact that they ALSO need a #1 type pure receiver is a different issue, IMO, but once they get that guy, Tavon combined with the WR is going to be very interesting.
And btw I don't think Tavon isn't a pure receiver because of his size. It's because of his skill set--size aside, he doesn't have some key WR chops. Which has always been fine with me. I said before the 2013 draft that Tavon wasn't really a receiver per se and I still advocated taking him.
He has been used in other ways. They had the formula down in 2015, when he had as many runs as catches, plus was being used as a decoy, plus always represented a scoring threat on returns.
I think McVay partly gets that:
"you look at some of the things that Tavon Austin does with the ball, both in the run-game and when he’s able to catch it as a receiver. He’s a guy that you want to move all over the formation."Though he also holds out for something else: "
you see a lot of encouraging things and you see where he can take that growth and that next to become a true, complete receiver"Maybe that can happen but I personally doubt it.
In terms of it being an awful offense, well yeah. But I don't leap to a lot of conclusions about that because so many different things contributed to that, that it's very hard to draw any reliable conclusions. It would be a challenge to sort out talent from other factors, and the mistake, IMO, would be try to reduce the problem to one thing--talent, or coaching, or anything else. Last year was a perfect cluster storm of different things happening at once. The Rams hired good coaches for 2017 it looks like but then at the same time, the truth is, no one really knows what the actual talent mix is like. They just don't. (Excluding the coaches who are in the middle of evaluations...talking about media analysts and fans). And to me, not knowing means not knowing--it doesn't mean not knowing and therefore you assume it's good/or/bad. It just means not knowing.
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/12/2017 08:37AM by zn.