Was really rooting for him. Dude balled out during the preseason. Like you said, too many good receivers on the roster. That’s a good problem.
I've been saying for months, maybe as many as half the wideouts we have on our roster right now we're never going to really know what their ultimate potential is until they they move on to other teams because of the logjam - either through getting snatched up as free agents starting next year because someone else offers them more than they would make as our #4 or 5 guy, or because someone offers us a pick or a player that helps us more than leaving them buried in the basement of our depth chart.
It takes reps not just to develop a WR, it takes reps just to see what their
potential is to develop. Players like Donald Driver, James Jones, Greg Jennings, even Davante Adams took as many as 2 or 3 years of regular snaps before we really knew how good they were going to be. Considering how many people were howling to cut Driver, Jones, amd even Aadms the first year ior two, I wonder how many of them would have gotten the chances they eneded to prove themselves if they were #5 on the depth chart? Is Malik Heath the next Donald Driver?
At least two or three of the guys in the bottom half of our depth chart this month are just never going to see enough snaps in Green Bay to really show their full potential.
Any one of the top 6 or 7 WR's on our roster in 23 is a guy I wouldn't be shocked to see as a Top 3 on someone else's team in 25 or 26. That's not to say they all
will make it, but any one of them seems to have the upside. I just hope we can as much as we can for as many of them as we can on their way out.
But the
really exciting thing for me (and I know I've said this before, too) is - was this a fluke, or did Gute suddenly get extremely good at identifying WR talent and potential? Is this scouting, or winning the lottery 7 out of 7 times? Or, how much of it is Jason Vrabel, the WR coach/passing game coordinator who worked with Tom Clements last year to turn all these kids into such a lethal gang of downfield and sideline assassins? There was a lot of coaching that went into that, and I attribute that mostly to Vrabel because the receivers do also. They rave about how much he's improved their games and how quickly.
We don't have any new receivers this season, but we'll be drafting a couple more next year, and probably inviting some UFDAs. If that crop has anywhere near the same success that the Class of 22 and 23 had, we have to seriously consider that it's no longer just a matter of getting lucky - that some of the people who are responsible for this aspect of building a team are unusually good at what they do.
And that would bode very well for our future success.
