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March 18, 2017

A tally of the Eagles' drops in 2016

As we all know, the Philadelphia Eagles' wide receivers (and other skill position players too, for that matter) drop an absurd number of passes. At around the midway point of the 2016 season, we tallied up the all the drops through nine games, and even showed them all in video.

We had a chance to look at the last seven games, and find a total of all the Eagles' drops in 2016.

For some reason, as heavily as the NFL is covered from a statistical metric standpoint, there are no reliable sources for drops. If you google "NFL drops" or something similar, chances are you'll find a site called "Sporting Charts." Please note that their drop totals are useless. For example, a season ago, they had Jordan Matthews down for five drops in 2015. This video shows that Matthews had somewhere around double that total. Many wrongfully cite their numbers, although I wouldn't blame them, as you tend to just trust stats when you see them.

While drops are certainly subjective to some degree, the following is a more accurate representation of the number of drops by each Eagles player in 2016. We'll order them by number of drops, but the column to the far right shows the total drop percentage of what we'll refer to as "reasonably catchable passes," or drops / (drops plus catches). To be clear, that's not total targets, which I believe are a bad measure of drop percentage, seeing as the receiver often has no chance of catching some of those targets. Got it? OK good:

 PlayerDrops Catches Drop % of catchable passes 
Dorial Green-Beckham 12 36 25% 
 Jordan Matthews73 9.9% 
 Nelson Agholor36 14.3% 
 Trey Burton37 9.8% 
 Darren Sproles52 7.1% 
 Kenjon Barner28.6% 
 Zach Ertz78 2.5% 
 Byron Marshall25% 
 Wendell Smallwood14.3% 
 Paul Turner10% 
 Ryan Mathews13 7.1% 
 Brent Celek14 6.7% 


The following players had no drops:

  1. Josh Huff: 13 catches
  2. Bryce Treggs: 3 catches
  3. Carson Wentz: 1 catch
  4. Terrell Watson: 1 catch
Green-Beckham, Matthews, and Agholor all had far too many drops in 2016, but holy hell, Green-Beckham's hands were beyond bad. It's going to be very difficult for the Eagles to justify his roster spot in 2017 if he isn't vastly improved in training camp and the preseason.


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