I'm with you on this one. Van's upside has been very close to what he brought in as a rookie, given his pedigree. Still doesn't go after the ball aggressively enough to suit me, althoiugh he has secure hands when he's open. Route running was good coming in, has improved with experience.
My bottom line, trade him.
Either for a pick on draft day, or if there's a trade partner out there, straight-up for a journeyman OG?
Another thought: Concern for special teams gets mentioned often in these threads. We have a good special teams gunner in Harris whose 40 time is just
seven hundreths of a second behind Tutu's. There's your deep threat.
We tried to make a tight end out of him - at the time we were WR rich, supposedly, and TE poor. Still are TE poor and the experiment didn't work, IMO. Time to go get a legit TE.
The TE experiment must have proved Harris athletic enough, willing enough, and smart enough (all important at the TE position) to play TE. Ought to be able to play WR and I don't recall
any successful NFL TE's with a beanpole (6'5" 219 lbs.) build.
He has a much bigger catch radius, once free, than Tutu - and on a couple of limited clips (below) shows more competetiveness for the ball (importand trait, downfield) than Van. I think he has the potential to be more useful at WR now than when he came in. Keep him as a gunner and see how he develops as a wideout. Between Skow, Harris, and maybe Tutu (still not sold on his value) Van's real value going forward shouldn't be that hard to replace.
