Arizona Cardinals: Michael Floyd is fine

The Arizona Cardinals passing attack suffered through injuries two its top two quarterbacks last season, so it’s not a surprise that Michael Floyd suffered on the stat sheet, catching just 47 passes after clearing 1,000 receiving yards in a breakout 2013 season. Floyd toughed it out through an injury in the previous season to briefly usurp Larry Fitzgerald as the team’s No. 1 receiver, but he was slightly out-targeted by Fitzgerald last season.

Fitzgerald operated as the team’s No. 1 receiver last season though his four target advantage was less pronounced than his 16-catch advantage over Floyd. Basically, the Cardinals use Fitzgerald to his strengths by making him the possession guy on intermediate routes, while they used Floyd as a playmaker on vertical routes. Thus, Floyd had 17.9 yards per reception compared to Fitzgerald’s still-respectable 12.4, and the younger Cardinal WR had 57 more yards through the air.

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According to Advanced Football Analytics, a whopping 48.5% of Floyd’s targets came at least 15 yards away from the line of scrimmage, and that’s well above his 2013 season clip of 34.5%. The Cardinals used Floyd as a decoy at times, because if he wasn’t making big plays, he was clearing out space for Fitzgerald, John Carlson, John Brown (the other playmaking threat), Jaron Brown, and talented pass-catching back Andre Ellington.

Floyd’s usage last season makes Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians’s comments extremely interesting, because, per FOX Sports 910’s Mike Jurecki, Arians essentially stated that he would like to see Floyd become more consistent in 2015. Arians added that the Notre Dame product should have “easily” had a 1,000-yard season in 2014, because he is capable of hitting quadruple digits “ever year”.

Last season, Floyd was targeted 99 times, which means that he would have had to average a stellar 10.1 yards per target in order to reach that clip. So let’s say Floyd’s outstanding 17.9 YPR stays constant but the only thing that changes is his 47.5% catch rate. If that’s the case, then, since he was 159 away from the 1,000-yard mark, he would have had to catch nine more passes. 56 receptions out of 99 yields a 56.6% catch rate and about 1,003 yards on those 56 catches.

What does all this number-crunching mean? It means that Arians is asking someone who was second in the league in yards per reception to put up DeSean Jackson-type numbers as a vertical threat. Jackson had over 1,000 yards on just 52 receptions thanks to an insane 20.2 YPR and 59.1% catch rate. With just 88 targets, D-Jax surpassed the 1,000-yard threshold, and he didn’t have the best quarterbacks either.

Jackson, of course, averaged 11.9 yards per target to lead the league, and that’s a number that will be difficult for even Jackson, the NFL’s premier deep threat, to replicate.

Arians is correct in his assertion that Floyd must become more consistent, because he, per Pro Football Focus, dropped five passes to go with the sub-50% catch rate. The issue is that it isn’t realistic to expect Floyd to have double-digit yards per target, because only seven receivers met that mark last season.

Michael Floyd plays a valuable role in the Cardinals offense as a field-stretcher, because he and Fitzgerald must complement each other due to their differing skill-sets. Of course, Floyd is capable of doing more than just being a decoy/deep threat, though he did also average 16.0 yards per reception in his breakout 2013 campaign.

If we look at Floyd’s yards per target averages in the past two seasons, they’ve been 9.3 and 8.5, respectively, which are both commendable marks. You can look at his 47 receptions last season and assume that he didn’t play well, but the fact of the matter is that the Cardinals didn’t throw it to him much. But therein lies the quandary, did they target him 99 times out of choice or out of necessity? Basically, did Floyd have less than 100 targets because he couldn’t get open?

Well, it’s very difficult to get open when nearly half of your routes are vertical ones, and even D-Jax was only targeted 88 times. Of course, Jackson performed much better and is the better player, but it’s difficult to expect Floyd to get open on a consistent basis when he’s averaging nearly 18 yards per reception. Still, he was inconsistent enough to have less than 50 receiving yards in over half of his games, and that’s a big reason why the more reliable Fitzgerald led the team in targets last season despite being second in receiving yards.

At 25, Floyd has monster upside, and Carson Palmer‘s return to health will allow the Arizona Cardinals to do a better job of getting him involved more often. Arians stated that Floyd might have been the biggest victim of the team’s awful quarterback play last season, and I unequivocally agree with him. The Cardinals, by my estimation, used him on increasingly deeper routes in an effort to open up the short and intermediate stuff to make life easier on their QBs while simultaneously giving the strong-armed Drew Stanton an excellent downfield option.

Dec 21, 2014; Glendale, AZ, USA; Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Michael Floyd (15) before facing the Seattle Seahawks at University of Phoenix Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports

In 2013, Floyd produced a 58.4% catch rate on 16.0 yards per reception to help him notch 1,054 yards on just 113 targets. His decrease in targets was a result of the shift in his usage to more of a vertical role, and that may have had something to do with the need for him to run those clear-out routes.

He played better than the box score stats indicate, and Floyd, who is heading into his final year before the Cardinals must decide on a fifth-year option, seems headed for a bounce-back season. Arians’s words of encouragement are a positive sign, and I would be shocked if they don’t keep him; he’s their best playmaker in the passing game.

Floyd had an excellent 2013 season, and his 2014 season was largely born out of poor QB play and a role in which consistency was an impossible task.

He needs to display better hands and should have caught more of what was thrown at him, but it’s hard to give him a fair evaluation after the team’s situation on offense.

A great bet for a much better 2015 season, Floyd isn’t someone to worry about, especially since he has some extra motivation to have a big year. With better QB play, possibly more targets, and, hopefully, routes that are more conducive to catches (as opposed to decoy-type routes), the ingredients should be there for a bounce-back campaign.

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