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March 25, 200803/26 Minute: More Roster Moves
March 26, 2008Scouts, Inc. Releases Their Top 64 WRs List
I happened to catch this over at the Hashmarks blog. Scouts, Inc., ESPN’s in-house network of football scouts, have released their rankings of the top 64 Wide Receivers in the NFL.
The Browns’ top 3 wide receivers all made the list. Braylon Edwards obviously came in the highest at #7. Donte’ Stallworth notched the #37 spot and Joe Jurevicius rounded out the corps at #60. I’d love to see what the list would look like if you took Tight Ends into consideration as well, because you’d have to believe Kellen Winslow would make the cut as well.
Here’s what the Scouts, Inc experts had to say about each of the Browns WRs:
#7 Braylon Edwards
“After some early growing pains, Edwards has been as good as advertised. Edwards, who had nine touchdown catches in his first two seasons, had 16 in 2007. He has matured on and off the field, a big reason he has become one of the premier receivers in the game. One negative: He tied for the league lead (with Colts TE Dallas Clark) with drops with 12, according to Stats LLC.”
#37 Donte’ Stallworth
“Stallworth is with his fourth team in his short career, which tells you a little about his true value. He can run past just about any defensive back in the league and offers a lot after the catch, but he is injury prone and inconsistent in just about every area. He will make some big plays for the Browns and will face a lot of single coverage with Braylon Edwards and Kellen Winslow as teammates. Just don’t expect him to light it up week after week.”
#60 Joe Jurevicius
“He has always been a team’s third receiver because of a lack of speed. He knows how to read coverages and find the soft spots in zone coverage. Because of his size (6-5, 232) and competitiveness, he can be dangerous in the red zone. He had 50 catches last season, the third most in his 10-year career.”
So just how do the Browns receiving corps compare to others around the league? Well, there are a couple ways to look at it. There are only 7 other teams with three WRs on the list (Colts, Bengals, Panthers, Cowboys, Packers, Seahawks, and Ravens), and when you average the rankings of the 3 WRs for these teams, the Browns rank 6th in the NFL.
Only 6 teams had only one WR on the list (Texans, Chiefs, Buccaneers, Redskins, Titans, and Bears). All the rest had 2 WRs on there. If you want to do an average for all 32 teams, it gets a little tricky. A straight ranking of averages gives too big of an advantage to a team like the Texans, who only have one WR on the list, but that WR ranks 4th in the NFL, giving them an average of 4.00, but a team like the Browns who have 3 WRs on the list are being penalized for it as they end up with an average way back of 34.66, which ranks them 16th in the NFL.
So what I did was I weighted each WR that didn’t make the list as the 65th best WR in the league (not mathematically sound, I know, but effective in giving us some standard of comparison since we have no way of knowing where the #2 and #3 WRs for many of these teams would be ranked). Then I took the averages of these adjusted totals. Doing it this way, I came up with the Browns having the 9th best WR corps in the NFL, which to me seems pretty fair and accurate. The top 10 are, in order, Colts, Bengals, Cardinals, Patriots, Panthers, Cowboys, Steelers, Packers, Browns, Lions.
Basically, what this shows is that the Browns seem to be setup pretty nicely at WR. Obviously, we all know this is likely to be Joe Jurevicius’ last year based on his recent comments, so there will be some production there that needs to be replaced long term. But the nice thing about the growing stability of the Browns’ roster is that it makes it that much easier for you when you only have one or two areas that need to be addressed, and you can focus all of your energies on that one position. Like Scott pointed out yesterday, things truly are looking up for the Cleveland Browns.
You can view the full results of the WR Rankings below:
5 Comments
Glad you covered this – I saw it earlier this afternoon. Seventh is pretty freaking good for a kid that’s only been in the league as long as Edwards. When you look at the company that surrounds him, you almost have to step back and say “man, he is good.”
GREAT post.
this is going to be a tough offense to stop…provided the QB situation becomes consistent.
Here’s something to consider- add to all of this our Pro Bowl tight end and the ‘receiving corps’ is even better. Our TE situation is easily better than the Packers, Steelers, Panthers, Cardinals and Bengals. I would imagine that would inch us up the list no?
one would think.
why wasn’t travis wilson on the list?
The list for the alternates is in the ladies room.