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I don't like seeing a back injury on a guy who missed a season already with a neck injury. If they're unrelated and he comes back healthy, I see Rivers looking to him in the red zone often.
That's probably true but I think the bigger dynamic is they are moving to a new city that already has a new team that's a boring loser of a franchise right now with a questionable young qb, an underperforming stud running back and a good but not elite defense. It's a huge opportunity for the chargers to become the sexy team by building a high flying offense that keeps eyeballs on TVs. Either way, good for Rivers. That doesn't mean Williams will be the wr1 our wr2 on the team as a rookie though. Those are two very different things. I think he contributes right away but I'm not sure he will be fantasy relevant year 1.
Slapdash said:
Good to hear. Realized the first injury was a freak one, just was nervous seeing a similar body area with trouble. Back injuries make me more nervous after years of Gronk.
I feel like you didn't watch the national championship game. Just because Clemson had enough weapons to avoid bad matchups doesn't mean he was shut down.
Without a doubt Williams was better than Nuk. I'm actually a bit surprised how well Nuk has done since transitioning to the NFL because his physical skills were not elite, but he has optimized the skills he does have.
Care to give me examples as I gave 5 where he played top teams that had talented corners and lit them up. Of course those stats don't tell the entire story since he had a ton of PI calls against him too (such as when he was tackled in the end zone right before the go ahead TD against Bama), but the stats do enough on their own.
I'm not dismissing, I think you're wrong.
Weren't PFF the same ones that trumpeted out that Melvin Gordon stat in a podcast earlier this offseason about how his YPC was affected a huge amount by his high number of goaline carries? But then it turned out that, much like we're potentially seeing here, it wasn't put into context because they didn't look at how Gordon's YPC decrease due to goaline carries compared to the rest of the league, and it turned out that what they made sound like a big number was actually right on the league average once people started running the rest of the numbers?
I guess everyone has their own metrics, hence Hopkins falling to the end of the 1st round of the NFL draft despite an uber-weak skill position draft while Williams went top 10 in a strong one.
Sure everyone has their own metrics, I'm just going by the ones that have the highest correlation to NFL success for a WR.
Higher correlation than draft position? I'm actually asking, I don't know the answer.
I'll find the links for you. Draft position certainly is a key factor but when we are talking about first round picks, I'm not sure it's as important.
How is a guy going to have an early breakout age when he spent a year on the shelf due to a broken neck? He had 1k yards and 6 TDs as a sophomore, how does that not constitute a breakout?
Not sure this is particularly predictive. That's 7/11 for 83 yds, or a 64% catch rate against NFL corners. Nuk in 2014/2015/2016 had a 60%/58%/52% catch rate against NFL corners. You can certainly argue about quality of QB, small sample size, etc, but it looks to me that Nuk has had less success against NFL corners as compared to Williams. YMMV
Thanks for the link. Interesting read.
As @Biabreakable said, Nuk had a lot more talent around him then Mike Williams did. Hopkins accounted for 39% of the offense as a junior. That's a huge number for a big conference school. 27% for Mike Williams.bigmarc27 said:
Wat?
Breakout age is the first time a WR makes up 20% of the passing offense. It happened for Hopkins as a freshman and he had minimal competition. Hopkins second year, he was competing with Sammy, Martavis. Williams had to compete with Sammy as a freshman. Williams sophomore year was by far the best of his college careeer but there was no competition. Artavis Scott was the 2nd WR on the team.
Honestly any stat that says Hopkins had a breakout as a freshman or a much better year is pretty stupid and makes me question it's validity. The entire Clemson team passed for 2500 yards. Just because Nuk had 623 of those yards and a team completely devoid of talent doesn't equal a "breakout."
The second half of your post contradicts the first half. You're essentially saying that draft position is more important because it already has college production built in, but the massive gulf in draft position between Williams and Hopkins is overridden by.....that same college production?
I said none of the metrics are more predictive than the draft position and that all of that information has been considered by the NFL teams in their decision making process. So discussion of their college performance does not over-ride that in my opinion. So no contradiction. If I phrased this poorly my mistake.
That is the way workdog did his study. There are problems with this method just as there are problems with doing it by round, or by partitioning the draft position in the round. There will always be some arbitrary cut off points involved no matter how you try to slice these things. Workdog decided the best way to approach it was by the order the players were drafted by position, instead of by draft round.
I didn't shrug it off. I think being drafted 7th overall compared to 27th overall is significant. As I said this is definitely in Mike Williams favor.
MW DH
age 22.1 20.5
yd/g 90.7 108.1
yd/TmYd 27% 34%
yd/tar 9.72 10.98
td/g 0.73 1.38
td/tm ptd 24% 45%
td/tm off td 14% 26%
25+rec/g 0.80 1.54
40+rec/g 0.07 0.54
drop rate 5.8% 7.9%
YAC/rec 4.0 5.5
ht 75.8 73.0
wt 218 214
arm length 33.38 33.38
40 time 4.57 4.51
vert 32.5 36
broad 121 115
draft pick 7 27Maybe.
Outside of a good rookie season, 4 years ago, where is all of this Keenan Allen production you guys speak of? I don't see it.
I agree but the first half of 2015 Allen was a top 3 receiver in every scoring system and number one in some. He was also on pace to lead the NFL in targets with 178 iirc, which makes an encore unlikely, but he's a productive player when he gets targets
Clemson in MW's final year vs Hopkins final year is a much different team. The only other WR of note that year was Watkins who was suspended and then hurt. Watkins would have ranked 4th in yards on this last season's team with Artavis Scott and Renfrow right behind him.
Keenan averages 5.8 rec/game, 68 yards/game and 0.4 TD/game. Over a 16 game season, that is 93 receptions, 1088 and 7 TDs. It's not Randy Moss but for a 3rd round pick, it's a big hit and a WR1 in PPR. If Mike Williams clearly surpasses those averages, he probably is on par with Green and Evans.
That is just 1 stat and has to be viewed amongst the full analytic picture. Kupp did account for a 40% of the passing offense which is very good (about the same as Hopkins, still not as good as say Keenan Allen). However, Kupp was doing this in a lower division and as a 23 year old. When Hopkins was 23, he was a 3rd year NFL player posting 1500 yards.
Not with the premise / stats being used, no. If you've seen both and want to say Hopkins, whatever, your prerogative. The stats being used to make the case are completely misleading and anyone who watched the games would know as such.
That's my fault... having watched every Clemson game for the last two decades, I mentioned how talented MW was and that he'd only rank behind Watkins in the best WRs to come through the program during that time. It apparently rubbed some the wrong way.
