Packer Central

An Absurd Stat About the Packers’ Receivers

The Green Bay Packers, obviously, haven’t adapted well at all to the offseason trade of Davante Adams. Here’s the outlook for Sunday against the Dallas Cowboys.

Bill Huber

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GREEN BAY, Wis. – Davante Adams is one of the best receivers in the NFL. Without him, the Green Bay Packers have one of the worst receiver corps.

Inexperience and injuries at that position have helped conspire to ruin Green Bay’s season. The free-agent flier taken on Sammy Watkins has crashed and the rookie trio of Romeo Doubs, Christian Watson and Samori Toure have shown only sporadic progress.

With Randall Cobb on injured reserve with an ankle injury and Doubs expected to miss at least a few weeks with an ankle injury of his own, the Packers are going to roll out the most uninspiring group of receivers in the NFL for Sunday’s game against the powerful Dallas Cowboys. Here’s the breakdown without the combined 49 catches from Doubs (31) and Cobb (18).

Allen Lazard: 30 catches, 427 yards, five touchdowns.

Sammy Watkins: 10 catches, 159 yards, zero touchdowns.

Christian Watson: 10 catches, 88 yards, zero touchdowns.

Samori Toure: four catches, 75 yards, one touchdown.

Amari Rodgers: four catches, 50 yards, zero touchdowns.

Totals: 58 catches, 799 yards, six touchdowns. If you add the one catch provided by practice-squad receiver Juwann Winfree in his three appearances, that goes up to 59 catches, 816 yards and six touchdowns.

Including Winfree, three individual receivers have more receptions than the receivers the Packers might line up with against the Cowboys: Miami’s Tyreek Hill has 76, followed by the Rams’ Cooper Kupp with 72 and the Bills’ Stefon Diggs with 60. Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson has 59 receptions in one fewer game. Three receivers have more yards than the Packers’ group: Hill with 1,104, Jefferson with 867 and Diggs with 857. Kupp has 813 in one fewer game. With seven apiece, Diggs and Adams have more touchdowns.

Miami’s Hill and Jaylen Waddle (812 yards) rank first and fifth, respectively, in receiving yards. That’s 1,916 yards in nine games. Rodgers has 2,091 passing yards, total, in his nine games.

The aforementioned six Packers receivers who could play on Sunday have caught 57.2 percent of targets and dropped seven passes (6.8 percent).

Through nine games last season, Adams had 65 receptions for 864 yards and three touchdowns, a catch rate of 68.4 percent and two drops (2.1 percent).

Through eight games this season with the Raiders, Adams has 48 receptions for 656 yards and seven touchdowns, a catch rate of 60.0 percent and two drops (4.0 percent).

Are Green Bay’s struggles rooted mostly in the loss of Adams?

“I think there’s a lot to it,” quarterback Aaron Rodgers said after throwing three interceptions in an embarrassing loss at Detroit on Sunday. “But it really just comes down to execution. Play comes in, we’ve got to execute it. There’s a lot of things that go into that. We had a couple chances for sure. Can’t lose a game like that against that team, though, so that’s going to hurt for a while.”

On Wednesday, Rodgers mostly dismissed the theory that his play had been impacted by the perpetual uncertainty over whether the receivers on any given play would be open in the right place at the right time.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I think that might play into a little bit of it, but I think there’s a combination of a lot of different things. It’s hard to put it on just one thing.”

Dallas’ leading receiver is CeeDee Lamb. In eight games, he’s caught 42 passes for 556 yards and three touchdowns. He has five games of 70-plus yards. Green Bay’s receiver corps has six games of 70-plus yards, with three for Lazard and one each for Doubs, Watkins and Cobb.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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