The Patriots Historic Problem With WR Busts is Now at Biblical Proportions

I interrupt the semi-official bereavement leave I've been on because we have a crucial matter to discuss. One I'd be talking about with my brothers if they were still here. The Patriots are rolling into the second half(ish) of the season. And for arguably the sixth year in a row, are doing so with the worst wide receiver room in the NFL. 

Unlike their league worst offensive line, the failure of the wideouts is not due to neglect. Sure, they could've signed some veterans with more going for them than KJ Osborn. But when you've just fired your head coach and drafted 21-year-old rookie QB, not a lot of free agents with options are going to get their agents on the phone and yell "Get me to New England right fucking NOW!" So just in the last three drafts they added Tyquan Thornton (50th overall in 2022), Kayshon Boutte and  Demario Douglas (187 and 210 in 2023) and Ja'Lynn Polk and Javon Baker (37 and 110 this year). And aside from Douglas, have produced the wide receiver equivalent of the Harris-Walz campaign. (Not talking politics; just trying to keep the references current.) 

I bring this up because the failure of this franchise to draft and develop wideout prospects - particularly in the top half of the draft where they went fishing for Thornton, Polk and Baker - has achieved crisis levels. 

Consider Polk. Whom I was willing to wait a season for at least, because he was not considered a completely NFL-ready  prospect:

So what I'm taking away from this is exactly what I said when they took Drake Maye. These picks so are are not about instantly turning this franchise - this offense in particular - around immediately. Yes, Polk posted 1,159 yards and 9 TDs in Washington last year. And has had an average of 16.8 YPC in each of the last two seasons. But like Maye, he's not a finished product. He's not a plug-and-play rookie like so many guys still on the board are. This is another case of Wolf's staff looking ahead. Finding someone they are comfortable believing can be coached up, worked on, refined, into a consistently reliable weapon. Just not this year.

But holy schneikies, I was not ready for him to be such a catastrophe that when graphing all NFL receivers, you have to view the chart from a satellite in order to fit him in:

The last guy who was that isolated made a vegetable garden out of his own feces:

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Statistically, Polk has been as bad as you can possibly be without getting relegated to the XFL:

Source (paywall) - [W]ide receiver is generally a position where youngsters can produce quickly in the NFL — and one where early production is generally indicative of long-term success. It’s not a position, like many others, where players can often take several years to develop before breaking out.

And the early returns from Polk? They rank him as the league’s worst wide receiver. Among 128 wide receivers with at least 10 targets, Polk is 128th in Pro Football Focus’ rankings, 128th in yards after the catch per reception, 127th in yards per route run and 126th (out of 126 receivers) at separation when targeted, per Next Gen Stats.

But hey, things can't be all bad with this year's rookie wideouts, right? It figures that if Polk is graphically and statistically the worst in the league, then that means Baker, who came out of the draft birth canal supremely confident:

… must be doing better. Except he's not. He isn't the worst because he doesn't qualify, with his four games played, zero targets and zero receptions. 

And of course Thornton has chiseled his Bust status into granite thanks to four games without a catch, two healthy scratches, a team-high 20.0% drop rate, and four receptions, giving him a career total of 39 halfway through his third season, for 385 yards and two touchdowns. By way of comparison, Danny Amendola went undrafted, and had 26 catches for 348 yards and 2 TDs just in the 2018 postseason. In three games. 

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Like I said in the headline, this problem is historic when it comes to this franchise. There's no need to run down the list, but it is long and undistinguished. 10 years or so, I could dismiss all the highly drafted receivers who busted like overcooked sausages around here by pointing out the insanely high bust rate at the position. Wide receiver is the crappiest crapshoot in all of sports. In the mid-2000s, Matt Millen famously drafted four receivers in the Top 10 over a five-draft span. And out of those he got Calvin Johnson, the league's first 0-16 team, and fired. 

Besides, I could always fall back the successes on the Pats. Like Deion Branch and Julian Edelman. Or blame the high bust rate on factors like Tom Brady's impatience when it comes to guys who are slow to climb their learning curve. Or the complexity of the Erhardt-Perkins system, which accomplished veterans like Chad Jackson, DeVante Parker and Juju Smith-Schuster failed to grasp. That's one of the reasons I was OK with Mr. Kraft finally making a coaching change. Because 24 years of running a scheme where everyone has to memorize the Periodic Table just to find a seam in a defense was enough. I just wanted something basic, where guys can be plugged in, told to run a route tree, and stop jagging ourselves off over the  beautiful complexities of a scheme that took the best quarterback of all time to master.

But those factors no longer apply. I might be mentioning this for the first time, but Tom Brady is no longer here. And we've got a new coordinator operating out of an entirely different playbook for the first time since 1999. And the yet one constant remains. For every Pop Douglas, there's a handful of Thorntons, Polks and Bakers. And I suppose we can include Boutte in that, because his 18.8 drop % is higher than Polk's. It's just that he was a 6th round project and has made some of the biggest catches of the season, so I'll give him a bit of a pass. 

The problem here is systemic, even though it's a new system. And a new quarterback. One who's being done dirty by the whole lot of them. And essentially doing it without much in the way of help:

I wish I had an explanation. The Occam's Razor would be that their college scouting methods for the position were flawed under Belichick, and Eliot Wolf hasn't changed the procedures enough to make a difference. It could be the coaching. Tyler Hughes is the wide receivers coach after working with Polk as an offensive assistant last year. He worked for the Pats before that, from 2020-22. But again, we're seeing the same issues we had through the Charlie Weis years, Bill O'Brien twice, Josh McDaniel twice, and Matt Patricia. Everything changes, but the highly-drafted wideouts remain the same dog's breakfast they've always been. 

Maybe the wide receiver room has a gas leak. Or it's built on land where that used to be a cemetery, but they only moved the headstones. Perhaps Tony Dungy used his holy influence to bring down the Wrath of God on us after the 2003-04 Patriots beat up his receivers. Or it's just a long streak of bad luck in the game of chance that is drafting and developing this position. Whatever the cause, if things don't at least show signs of getting fixed over the last eight games, Patriots fans deserve to see some heads rolling around One Patriots Place. This can't continue.