The Kansas City Chiefs have made a swap of tight ends, waiving Jake O’Connell and signing veteran Anthony Becht. The Chiefs announced the move Friday, two days before they play at Detroit. O’Connell has appeared in 20 games for Kansas City over the past three seasons, making four starts, but caught only six passes for 53 yards. Becht has appeared in 158 games with 185 catches for 1,511 yards during his NFL career, but he was out of the league last season. The Chiefs have been looking for a pass-catching tight end to complement blocking specialist Leonard Pope ever since they lost Tony Moeaki to a torn left ACL in their final preseason game. Source: Associated Press
Don't you think this is typical of the NFL media though? Outside of the few major eastern teams (Don't need to state who they are, we all know them) they have no knowledge whatsoever.
Surely you would have to look on a play by play basis as to what he is in the game for. His early career stats with the Jets suggest he was a threat in the passing game (to a certain extent), but recent numbers suggest otherwise. However, you can't just assume that because his stats are poorer in recent years that he is just a blocker. You'd have to watch every play and analyse the percentage (no matter small the sample size) of times he simply stays home to block versus running a route. Either way though, it's a lame turn of phrase. May as well have just called him a journeyman TE rather than describe him as one thing or another.
Not really...he's pretty much always been labeled a blocking TE...including his time with the Jets. He's actually been labeled a blocking specialist.
He may well have been labelled as that - but isn't that the point being debated - that such labels may or may not actually be accurate if anyone were that inclined to study each and every one of Becht's snaps.
Not really. One "label" is correct, the writer of the article is totally incorrect in saying he is a "pass-catching" TE, because he's not. He's a blocking TE. It's well known around the league by the people that do watch every snap.
As I say, it's almost pointless labelling him as anything at this point as he has become fairly irrelevant in recent times. He is just a guy. That said, he was a decent redzone target - looking at career stats he has 21 TD out of a total of 185 catches - well over 10% of his catches were for TD's. I can kind of see why he could be labelled as a pass catcher, even if he isn't necessarily viewed as such now (a point I do agree on)
He's a tight end so QB's will be looking for him in the red zone because he's big. I think the fact that 10% of his catches are TD's solidifies the fact that he's not a pass catcher. He is a target in the red zone, not anywhere else. Receiving TE's are targets everywhere. I guarantee you that Tony Gonzalez and Antonio Gates have a much lower percentage of their catches being TD's because they catch the ball everywhere. Because they really are receiving TE's.
