Fair point. His old college teammate Fournette caught all of 41 passes in his three years at LSU and then caught 36 as an NFL rookie even with a good 3rd down back in Yeldon on board. I guess the same could happen with Guice - could be that LSU backs just aren't asked to catch the ball much.
The LSU RB really aren't asked to do that much.
I noted from my charting that Guice was a bit slow to release out on routes after checking for the blitz. This could be him just being slow to process, but it also may be how he is coached to wait that long. Defenders seem happy to just not blitz and neutralize Guice by just having a defender spy him.
In addition to this Guice rounds off his routes, two of his best receptions came off of shovel passes which Guice just hides behind his lineman after play action then the QB flips it to him and he does the rest. He does have a GREAT run after one of these picking up a lot of yards on his own.
In his game against Florida I only gave him credit for one good route run. He was targeted 3 times (so two routes that did not get credit for route running) and he drops two of these, bringing some questions about his catching technique in that game.
Overall from the 10 games charted he only gets credit for 10 good routes run, some games he has zero, most of the games he has one. The Louisville game with 3 and another game with two. He does catch 3 in the Louisville game so thats not bad, but in my notes I am talking about him being slow to release.
These criticisms are about things that I think are very coachable, so I don't see it as a big deal. It is mostly that LSU doesn't ask their RB to do these things, not that he isn't capable of doing them. The two drops from the Florida game would be more of a concern if I had seen him drop passes in other games as well, I didn't.
Only time will tell but I think Guice may be fine as a receiver, he just wasn't used as one by LSU to be sure.
I do have Ronald Jones running more routes than Guice does in the games I charted for him, and he does a better job of that from what I have seen of both of them. Jones just isn't targeted by Darnold much, even when he likely should have. For Jones I only charted 4 games, he has 3.75 positive routes per game in those, while Guice was only running one positive route per game from the 10 games charted. I would definitely give Jones an edge there.
That said Charles Sims and Quizz Rodgers are similarly good COP receiving RB to Chris Thompson and there is a pass catching RB for every one of these rookie RB to compete with for those opportunities as a receiver except for Barkley and Penny.
to think "rumors" caused the Eagles to pass on him considering they had him in for an actual visit. Maybe a whole lot of teams just didn't like him that much, Occam's Razor and all.
