With one week now remaining until the Pittsburgh Steelers report to Latrobe for the start of training camp, you probably don’t need to be reminded about how good of wide receiver Antonio Brown is. After all, his career stats say it all when it comes to consistency, overall production and everything else that goes along with playing the position. Sure, there other great wide receivers currently in the league who can also be put on a pedestal along with Brown, but when it comes to drop rates last season, the Steelers wide receiver was the best of whatever bunch you can choose.
According to Pro Football Focus, Brown had the lowest drop rate last season when it comes to wide receivers who had excessive amounts of catchable targets. According to their charting, Brown only dropped two passes last season on 108 total catchable targets. Technically, that equates to a 1.85% drop rate but I assume PFF chose to round down and listed him at 1.8%. In case you’re curious, STATS INC. also has Brown down for just two drops last season.
Now, we also chart all of the Steelers games and that includes drops. Matthew Marczi handles the Steelers offense when it comes to that and he has Brown down for three drops. With that said, he’s a very tough scorer.
As a matter of full disclosure, below are animated gifs of the three plays that Marczi scored Brown as having drops on. Two of the three were easy charting decisions and I doubt any of you will argue against them being drops. The third, however, which is the first one shown below, came in the season opener against the Washington Redskins. In all honesty, with the throw being low and behind Brown, you could easily argue that this incompletion shouldn’t be charged as a drop. I’d love to show you the television angle of that play, but NFL Gamepass is currently a useless piece of crap when it comes to those views.
Whether or not any of us view that particular incompletion against the Redskins as being a drop by Brown is really unimportant as the fact of the matter is that the Steelers wide receiver caught nearly everything thrown his way last season in addition to a few more that probably should be deemed extraordinary receptions.
