Contextualizing James Washington’s College 3rd Down Targets In 2016 & 2017

While drilling down into the college stats registered by new Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver James Washington, the team’s second-round draft pick this year, I noticed that only 36 of his 225 total receptions over the span of four seasons at Oklahoma State came on third downs and that low amount caught me by surprise. Because of that umber sticking out like a sore thumb, I decided to contextualize Washington’s third down pass targets over the course of the last two seasons in order to see if anything jumped out at me.

As you can see in the table below, Washington was targeted a total of 44 times on third downs over the course of his last two seasons at Oklahoma State. His 20 total receptions during those two seasons means he only had a 45.5% reception percentage and that’s a little alarming being as his quarterback Mason Rudolph posted some nice third down passing statistics during his college career. In fact, in 2016 and 2017 combined, Rudolph completed 57.8% of all third down pass attempts for an NCAA passer rating of 157.0. However, his passer rating was 138.0 on third downs when targeting Washington those two seasons.

After going through the tape of these 44 targets to Washington, which are all charted and linked to below, it became evident that quite a few of the 24 failed third down connections between Rudolph and Washington were a result of poor throws by the quarterback. In fact, quite a few times Rudolph was too high to Washington. You could also probably argue that in total, Washington is to blame for failing to make the catch on six of these failed attempts to Washington. It’s also worth pointing out that Washington probably made just as many combative catches on these 44 third down targets over the course of the last two seasons. There were also a few imcompletions where Rudolph and Washington didn’t appear to be on the same page with each other.

For the most part, and as we saw during our previous big play breakdowns of Washington, the wide receiver lined up on the right side of the formation. As for the kinds of routes that Washington mostly ran during these 44 plays, there were quite a few up deep gos, posts and quick slants. There were also a few quick screens. You really don’t see any short underneath crossers.

Of the 406 yards receiving that Washington registered on these 20 receptions, which by the way averages out to a stellar 20.3 yards per catch, 126 of them came after the catch, by my observations. That an average YAC of 6.3 yards, which is also stellar.

One other thing that stuck out to me while compiling this data is the fact that Washington was targeted just five times behind the first down marker. In short, Rudolph mostly targeted Washington past the chains and that’s a great sign when it comes to the quarterback’s play on third downs.