N/S Pats fans going off on Cooks and Brady
Well, I didn't. I guess I missed seeing all of his flaws.
It's pretty simple to explain.
When the Saints drafted Cooks he was wideley compared to Steve Smith.
Smith started out in the league as a punt returner and developed into an all around threat by his 3rd year.
With Cooks Saints thought they were getting a guy who could beat you
-Deep
-Intermediate
-Short
-Return Game
-Gadget Player
In year 1 it became apparent that he wasn't useful in the return game so they scraped that off his plate.
At one point Payton was quote as saying "We have the right returner, the other 10 guys need to be ready"
Cooks was never given an opportunity to return kicks again.
Cooks following that year talked about how he needed to improve on his YAC and seeing the field.
Now the Saints were counting on him to be a threat
-Short
-Intermediate
-Deep
-Gadget Player
Well because of his inability to navigate traffic it became apparent that Cooks wasn't a gadget player, nor was he a threat to take short routes the distance.
So then we get Cooks 3rd year and after drafting Thomas they scrapped the gadget plays with him and the short plays (went to thomas ie slants) and they only asked him to be a threat on
-intermmediate
-deep routes
We'll that eventually lead to a complain from Cooks that he wanted to be more part of the gameplan.
That lead to many of us fans pointing out that he wasn't a huge part of the gameplan because he has a limited tree of things he can do and do well. When the saints weren't dependent on getting him the ball they used him as a high end deep threat decoy.
So we went ahead and traded himi to the Pats where Brady could make use of him deep ball ability but the Pats assumed they could fix his ability to get open short by using him in the slot more.
Didn't work because he STILL CAN'T NAVIGATE TRAFFIC(and this was said repeatedly if you check that thread) and they are left with the same Brandin cooks we moved on from.
The guy who will kill you intermediate/deep and outrun anybody but can be taken out of the game and isn't a go to receiver by any stretch of the imagination
No Gloating
Just facts