This "value as a decoy" meme just amazes me.
Yes. McV uses the asset he has on his roster. He maximizes TA's value, not by feeding him the ball, but as a decoy. That tells you something right there. And when TA gets the ball ... very little happens.
And you know league DCs are smart enough to know that. At this point, they have to honor TA's deployment because if they don't, he could hurt them. But they know full well that reasonable deployment will contain him. No one is staying up at night dreading TA.
Now, the question you raise follows logically from the "TA as a decoy is actually essential to what our O is doing" meme. If that's true, then can it be replaced if he's gone?
Well, first, he is doing very little right now. It's not like he is producing in a way that few others can produce. If you really want to replace that precise role, there would be guys who could do it. TA is no where near unique.
More importantly,
THERE ARE OTHER WAYS to stretch defenses. Many of them. Essentially, TA offers jet sweep options. OK. NFL teams sometimes use jet sweeps, but they are far less effective than in college. And NFL teams have many other ways to put defenses on the rack.
I'm not even going to bother to list any. You all know them.
And we already have on our roster lots of guys who can stress defenses. And an OC/HC who is very inventive and productive without TA on the field. Remove TA from the roster (next year, I am pretty sure) and the offense will never miss him.
On this board, I think we have now reached a consensus about TA being overpaid. Yet many cling to this decoy notion. Yes, it is a minor factor because McV is too smart to let a minor asset go unused. But he has many alternatives. There is no need to replace TA because he just isn't that important an asset.
I continue to be baffled by the persistence of a vision of TA as an impact player. It has got to be a holdover from when he was one of our only assets. Well, he is a very limited asset and McV is using him as precisely that. It's time to recognize that his very limited production is not explained by some mysterious incapacity of his coaches to understand how to "set him free." That he isn't used for downfield passes because he can't do that. That his very mediocre results stem from his limitations as a ball carrier.
TA has been coached by 2 HCs and a sequence of OCs. None has figured out how to get top production from him. On this board we revere the current HC, who is getting very little out of him and asking 7 or 8 other guys to make the plays. It's time we realize that the guy is just not that great a player.
Let's replace him, not with a TA clone, but with a RB or flanker or TE or WR who can actually do a number of things on the field. Or, perhaps, with a good LB, since we already have a lot of offensive weapons.