I absolutely agree that once we arrive in the red zone, we need to finish with more TD's. So not arguing that with you at all. Whether Watkins is a key part of that or not I won't address as i have no particular wisdom to impart.
That having been said...that stat is a bit out of context.
Plays that start outside of the red zone and result in a touchdown are not counted. But those TD's count 6 points as well. How did we compare to other teams in terms of "# of scoring plays originating outside the end zone?" I suspect we were top 5 in this metric.
How about "% of drives that get into the red zone?" Especially compared to last year, but also in absolute terms, we had an outstanding % of drives that got to the red zone in the first place. The lack of work for Hekker in many games attests to this fact. In fact, I would not be surprised if we led the league in % of drives that got to the red zone.
So we scored a lower percentage of touchdowns than we liked once we got to the red zone, but we had lots of TD's scores from outside the RZ and we were very efficient about getting into the red zone in the first place. How do those metrics measure up in importance in comparison to RZ TD %?
While I have no issue with working to improve our RZ efficiency, I would not want to focus on it to the point that it negatively impacted our ability to get there in the first place. 100 drives reaching the end zone, with 50% of them resulting in TDs, is better than 60 drives that get there, even if we score TD's 80% of the time when we arrive.
Not sure if I have a conclusion other than to warn against over-focusing on just one stat outside of the bigger picture.
