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Originally Posted by jspchief
My biggest beef this week may have been Morton, and really all of our WRs. None of these guys attacks the ball. None of them act like they want it more than the defender. I'm watching receivers all over the league that are ripping balls out the air and coming back to passes, while our guys run their routes with their hands out and expect the ball to land in them.
Age has to be part of it. These guys just aren't as hungry. Hall will never be any real threat (as I've said all along). I'm ready to see Richard Smith in on every down. he may have dropped those passes, but on at least two of them he actually looked like he wanted it. He actually jumped for a high pass (gasp!) and came back to the ball (what a concept!).
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Yeah, I've been pretty disappointed with Morton for a while now. I'd heard that he was a solid performer from some Lions fans and was expecting him to be quietly excellent in the ways that the fans of a team recognize in a player even when he doesn't put up flashy numbers. But Morton has done little to impress me with his play. This year he's been very unimpressive. I wasn't sure what his deal was, but yesterday I saw a replay on a ball thrown to him that told me a lot. I saw the game on mute in a sports bar so I don't know if it was commented upon by the announcers, but he just totally punked out on a ball that was thrown to him over the middle in traffic.
I'm still hopeful about Hall as receiver. He has the kind of talent in the open-field that I expect he can learn to get separation from defenders.
Yesterday reminded me of the Chiefs' anemic offenses of, say, the 1996 season. I used to think that games were won at the line of scrimmage and that you can just plug in moderately good talent at the skill positions and still get good performances as long as you dominate the line. I've grown past that notion. There's a big damn drop-off between elite skill players and the overall replacement-level stuff that occupies the 2nd and 3rd-string on most rosters, it now seems to me.
I don't know if the other Chiefs' receivers are atacking the ball or not. Morton sure wasn't on that one play. I'm pretty confident that Green is capable of delivering the ball where it can be caught, so whatever problem there is with our passing game must lie with the receivers' lack of skills, but I don't know what skills each of them lacks.
On the other hand, my opinions on receivers aren't all that great. When Joe Horn played for us, I was convinced that he lacked the football smarts to excel in the NFL, based on a handful of plays in which he failed to try to bail out a quarterback flushed out of the pocket by coming back toward the ball. He sure proved me wrong with his subsequent play in New Orleans!