DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Pure Football Forum Trading Njoku?

Joke should be happy. A little embarrassed maybe considering he racked up 19 catches last season, but happy none the less.

Meanwhile, Higgy gets a 1 year deal and $2 mil.

Go figure.

Sounds like he's bought into the team? Tired of people questioning if he is or not?

We'll se what happens over the season..

Unless he asks for a trade, or unless someone offers an insane amount for him, I don't see the value in trading.

He's here to stay... we just have to get that long term contract worked out.

Well, that probably depends on if he actually meant "contempt" or if he really meant "content".

That's why they make the big bucks!

It's nice to have a FO that values good players and figures out ways to keep them on the team.

Previous FOs would have traded OBJ and Njoku based on media pressure alone.

You cannot overstate how smart Berry, Depo, and Stefanski are.

What a breath of fresh air.

Could be because Hooper and Bryant were both pretty "meh" last year.

Our 3 "highly acclaimed" TEs together, Hooper, Bryant, and Njoku had what, 90 catches for 900 yards? There were individual TEs with 100+ catches and well over 1000 yards.

I'm not sure the FO has figured out what the long term fix is for the TE position or if it's even on the team right now.

You can never have too many good players on a team. That's the punchline. Not the stats.

How many times where they targeted ?

FWIW, I'm not giving up on Hooper just yet, but he's on the hot seat.

Austin Hooper 46 Catches 435 Yds. 4 TD's
Harrison Bryant 24 Catches 238 Yds. 3 TD's
David Njoku 19 Catches 213 Yds. 2 TD's

So Our TE's as a group had 89 Catches 886 Yds 9 TD's

You are looking at it a the glass is half empty and by the words you use it seems as though you aren't sold on our TE group, I prefer to look at it as the glass is half full (I like our TE group) ... We all have our opinions

I think many are thinking about it from a "we pay Hooper a LOT" perspective.

Good, because I'm not.

We are paying Hooper more than Travis Kelce...

Bryant had minimal receiving stats and some very notable drops through the year, but he is only a rookie...

Njoku can't get the snaps, not sure why, but if I was guessing it's because he's not a great blocker and it seems our TEs primary job last year was to block...

I don't know how big of a part of the offense our TEs were supposed to be... the FO/Stefanski will have to make the call and I will trust them more than any other regime we've had for the last 20+ years.. but nothing I've seen from our TEs (statistically or otherwise) leads me to believe that if they asked for too much money, they can't be replaced..

I'll say one thing... if Njoku still isn't getting the snaps at the start of the new season, that'll be very curious. He really came on at the end of the season.

Couple things.

1. Whichever player signs the latest contract gets paid more/the most. If you are the best at your position as a FA you definitely get paid.

2. We were a new offense and scheme and coaching last season. First few games we were conservative and Baker didn't throw a lot in addition to the newness of most aspects of the offense.

3. We played 3 games in gail force winds and snow storms. From memory we maybe threw for 500 yards total in those 3 games .... Teams in a dome and playing catch up might do that on a single game.

Overall I thought our TEs were a bit meh. Bryant tailed off horribly after very prompt start. We didn't throw to Hooper as much I thought we could. Njoku was better than I expected for brief spells. I'm fine with leaving that group as is and expect a big step up in production.

Is he flippin kidding
He's putting me on right?

Not sure where you got that but Kelce is the 2nd highest paid TE in the league behind Kittle from San Fran. Kelce signed a 4 year $57 mill contract before last season that pays him an average of $14,312,500 per year. Hooper signed a 4 year $42 mill contract that pays him $10,500,000 per year on average.

Hooper was targeted 65 times last year which ranked him #16 among TEs less than half the number of targets Kelce (139) and Waller (140) received.

1. I agree. Hooper had 2-3 pro-bowl selections. Stefanski runs a 2 TE set and we needed to put more TE's on the roster. Hooper was the best FA available. We did what we had to do. We added the best TE available and drafted the best TE in the college game.

2. As for Hooper, we leaned heavily on him down the stretch and in the playoffs. A part of production is opportunity. Once we started throwing towards Hooper, the production was there.

3. As for David, I don't really know what to say. He has been here 4 years and has done some good and some of nothing. At some point the record speaks for itself and shouldn't need people endlessly defending him.

Hooper caught 7/15 targets in our loss against the Jets. Njoku had less than twice that many targets (29) on the entire season. Hooper averaged 6.21 yds/tgt while Njoku averaged 7.34 yds/tgt. Njoku was more productive with his opportunities. In the playoffs, Hooper was 4.43 yds/tgt. Njoku was 11 yds/tgt.
(Stats from pro-football-reference.com)



Njoku has performed numerically better on average per target than a pro bowl TE (Hooper) with his given opportunities. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't get to decide how many opportunities he gets. Looking at it this way, I'm starting to understand his and his agent's frustration.

This is the story folks .. Live with it .

j/c

Our TE group would look a lot different if we had a WR who could press the back end of the defense. JMO

I think you right .. I still believed our TE's would be targeted more in a Ski offence.

Hooper
targets 360 catches 279 catch rate 77.5%
yds 2,824 yds per target 7.84

Njoku
target 186 catches 117 catch rate 62.9%
yds 1,345 yds per target 7.23

Over his career Hooper has been the better player, your comparing what Njoku did on a limited number of snaps in 1 year which happened to be his best to Hooper's worst game and the worst season of his career. Maybe the reason Njoku was productive was because his snaps were limited.

Over his career, Hooper had Matt Ryan. Njoku had RGIII, McCown, Kessler, Kizer, and Hogan for his introduction to the NFL. Hooper's team went to the SuperBowl his rookie year. Njoku's team went 0-16. Hooper had Julio Jones and Sanu drawing coverage away from him. Njoku had...Sammie Coates and Corey Coleman (Josh Gordon played 5 games before getting in trouble for doing Josh Gordon things.) They were in entirely different circumstances.

I'm comparing them last year, with the same QB, in the same offense. That seems the fairest comparison to me.

If you just compare 2018, their raw production is fairly comparable. 88 targets a piece. 660 yds, 4 TDs for Hooper. 630 yds, 4 TDs for Njoku. But, again, Hooper was catching passes from top 10 QB Matt Ryan while Njoku had Tyrod Taylor/rookie Baker. Hooper still had Jones and Sanu and added Calvin Ridley. Njoku did get Landry added that year, but next was former draft bust Breshad Perriman. Hooper's "worst game" last year also happened to be the only one he's ever had to play with lousy receivers around him (Ja'Marcus Bradley was our leading WR with COVID exposure wiping out the room.)

I want to see how they both do here in year two of the same system with the same coaches (a first for Njoku) hopefully with a similar number of opportunities.

j/c

I don't believe that Stefanski is finished installing his offense by any means. As was mentioned by DC earlier, I trust Stefanski, Berry and company more than any past regime since our return.

Giving it some thought, it seems to me that as Stefanski expands installing his offense, the TE's will play a much bigger role than what we saw in year one.

The reason I come to this conclusion isn't complicated.

One either has to believe that we paid out a huge contract to Hooper, picked up the fifth year option on Njoku and wrapped all of that cap space into overpriced blockers, or they have a much bigger role in mind for our TE's.

I'm not suggesting that Stefanski, Berry and company will never make a mistake. What I am suggesting is that I don't believe they're foolish enough to wrap that much cap space into two TE's they don't expect to be big contributors.

FWIW Hooper also started the season with an appendix and finished it w/o.

As for David Njoku;
At some point the record speaks for itself and shouldn't need people endlessly attacking him.

j/c:

I can't see what you wrote, it's just a blank post, much like every time milk man has posted for years, my computer doesn't load youtube or whatever, onto dawgtalkers.

I agree. You have been complaining about this for years. Isn't it about time you put forth an effort to figure out why you can't get the videos and tweets to load? Unless you have a complete dinosaur, it should be a simple fix. In the time it takes you to yet again post that you can't see the tweet, you could type in a google search to tell you how to fix it....unless your computer doesn't get Google either.

TL's probably using an old IE browser. It won't read Twitter posts. He needs to download Firefox. Here's a free download ...

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

This is my thinking, as well.

This FO has been systematic and methodical in its approach from Day One. I see no evidence that they have gone stupid in this area of admin/roster building.

.02

I agree. Between Berry, Stefanski and Depo, we have three really smart people working together. I think they toss various scenarios around and have plans A,B,and C for just about everything related to roster, scheme, and direction.

Our leadership team doesn't take a backseat to anybody. Again, everything may not pan out, but not for lack of planning and deep thought.

I'd amend that to say that they have Plans A through Z, and then some.

I forget the context of who it involved, but we saw something this past winter where they talked about a guy we'd just signed and they did it because he was someone they'd been scouting and were looking to try to get him like two years down the road when he was supposed to hit the market. His unexpected release moved that timetable up and we got him already.

So, while we're all just now in the past three months looking at who the free agents are, or waiting for information from Pro Days to decide how we feel about a player, the guys in Berea are literally YEARS ahead of us in the information gathering realm, and I'd bet a paycheck that they have every last player graded in terms of how they play and in terms of how they fit what we want to do.... and they're constantly updating their information on all of these guys.

Some guy named Blake!