Since the Pittsburgh Steelers signed former New Orleans Saints wide receiver Lance Moore on Friday, I received an email from a reader informing me that he is not very good outside of the Superdome, so I thought I would have a look to see whether or not that is true.
As you can see in the table below, dating back to 2006, Moore has a career 69.4% completion ratio at home and a 64.3% completion ratio on the road when targeted. When you compare those percentages to the road stats of Steelers wide receivers dating back to 2006, you can see that’s not too shabby at all. In fact, only former Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward had a higher road completion percentage than Moore’s road percentage during that time span.
Now, where Moore does seem to drop off outside of the Superdome is in his yards per catch, as over his career it’s 1.5 yards lower on the road than at home. I’m not going to speculate as to why that is as there could be so many factors involved. At least his completion didn’t drop off dramatically.
Moore’s career yards per catch average of 11.6 on the road, however, is equal to that of Ward’s dating back to 2006. In case your curious, Ward’s career yards per catch on the road was 11.8. That’s pretty good company that Moore is in.
One final nugget for you. Dating back to 2006, there has been 61 wide receivers in the NFL that have been targeted on the road 200 or more times and Moore’s 64.3% completion percentage ranks him 7th on that list just behind Ward.
So in conclusion, I don’t think that the argument that Moore is only good when playing at the Superdome holds much water. Not only is he a fine wide receiver on third downs, he can play well n the road as well. And, yes, he had a pretty good quarterback throwing him the ball for his entire career, but he now has another pretty good one that he’ll be playing with in Pittsburgh.
PLAYER | TARG | REC | REC% | YDS | TD | YPC |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Lance Moore Home | 268 | 186 | 69.4% | 2431 | 25 | 13.1 |
Hines Ward Away | 337 | 217 | 64.4% | 2519 | 19 | 11.6 |
Lance Moore Away | 249 | 160 | 64.3% | 1852 | 13 | 11.6 |
Antonio Brown Away | 224 | 140 | 62.5% | 1722 | 4 | 12.3 |
Jerricho Cotchery Away | 64 | 39 | 60.9% | 569 | 6 | 14.6 |
Emmanuel Sanders Away | 140 | 85 | 60.7% | 1084 | 8 | 12.8 |
Mike Wallace Away | 205 | 116 | 56.6% | 2017 | 14 | 17.4 |
Cedrick Wilson Away | 47 | 26 | 55.3% | 293 | 1 | 11.3 |
Santonio Holmes Away | 227 | 125 | 55.1% | 2023 | 14 | 16.2 |
Nate Washington Away | 103 | 56 | 54.4% | 931 | 5 | 16.6 |