Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Mike Evans means everything

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost an important primetime game to Case Keenum and the St. Louis Rams last night, but it was impressive to watch Jameis Winston and Mike Evans nearly pull a “W” out of nothing, marching down the field without the help of injured veteran receiver Vincent Jackson.

As a rookie, Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Mike Evans was a revelation, and he taught plenty of fans a valuable lesson about scouting for positive traits in draft prospects. Although Evans never generated a huge amount of separation in college and looked like a potential size/speed bust at the position, critics of Evans’s failed to recognize just how brilliant he is at the catch point, how physical he is, and how underrated both his long speed and work in the intermediate regions of the field are.

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This season, I’ve heard some people stupidly criticize Evans. Some have called him a lazy route-runner, which evokes the same inane criticisms that plagued one of the greatest wide receivers in NFL history- a fellow by the name of Randy Moss.

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Another common criticism of Evans has been that he’s too drop prone. While it is valid to point out that a player with a ghastly 14 drops on the season needs to cut down on those mistakes, drops aren’t everything. You know which other wide receivers have high drop rates? Amari Cooper, Michael Crabtree, Julian Edelman, Demaryius Thomas, and Eric Decker. These five wideouts are also among the league’s most productive.

What matters is efficiency, and Evans has been quite efficient this season despite the fact that Doug Martin has been the only other consistent skill position player on offense. Yes, V-Jax is a darn good No. 2 receiver who is just as capable of stretching defenses (16.5 yards per reception), but the former San Diego Chargers star has been hobbled or out with an injury for much of the season (ten games played, nine starts).

This means that Evans has been tasked with essentially being the Buccaneers entire passing attack, and this isn’t even mentioning the fact that talented second-year TE Austin Seferian-Jenkins has only made five appearances and two starts in 2015 due to injury.

Last night’s loss to the Rams provided us with an example of just how valuable Evans is to this team. Again, with really only Martin and budding X-Factor Charles Sims backing up Evans and Winston, the former first-round pick out of Texas A&M was targeted a whopping 17 times.

He hauled in nine of those 17 targets from Winston for 157 yards, averaging over 17 yards per reception against a Rams defense that almost never gets burned; they are fourth in the NFL in yards per completion allowed, per Sporting Charts.

So, basically, the Rams excel at stopping big plays, they were up by a lot of points and knew that the Bucs could only throw it deep to get back in the game, and they knew that Evans was the Buccaneers only real weapon. I mean, Tampa Bay’s second-leading receiver last night was Adam Humphries, for crying out loud, and Evans was the only player with at least three receptions to have ten yards per completion.

Winston threw short passes to everyone else, but he was busy tossing it up to Evans for big gains. Honestly, you can say whatever the heck you want about Evans’s drops or whatever, but it takes a special kind of talent to average 9.23 yards per target on 17 targets when literally everyone on defense- and watching the game- knows the ball is coming to you.

And that’s the value of Evans. In Evans, the Buccaneers have a huge, fast wide receiver who possesses a jaw-dropping catch radius and can literally carry an entire passing attack. Even when the Bucs were forced to abandon the running game late, Evans delivered, elevating his team as effectively as we’ve seen other elite receivers like Odell Beckham Jr., Julio Jones, and Alshon Jeffery lift their teams this season.

In a sense, Evans is the best fit for a No. 1 receiver that Winston could have. Winston is willing to take shots downfield, and he loves trusting wide receivers to make plays. That didn’t work out so well for him in his final year at Florida State when Rashad Greene was his go-to guy, mostly because Greene is small and doesn’t have the vertical or jump-ball ability that a guy like Evans or Kelvin Benjamin does.

There’s no doubt that Evans still has some refining to do, which is something one of my followers wisely pointed out yesterday.

Despite his flaws, Evans is one of the best wide receivers in the business, and it’s important to have a keen understanding of how he wins and how matchup-proof he is.

Sep 27, 2015; Houston, TX, USA; Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Mike Evans (13) runs with the ball as Houston Texans cornerback Kareem Jackson (25) defends during the game at NRG Stadium. Houston won 19-9. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

There have been several games this season in which Evans was the entire passing attack, and, with 80.5 receiving yards per game, he hasn’t disappointed despite seeing so much extra attention.

If you still have a subscription to Pro Football Focus’s “Signature Stats”, then I would highly recommend looking at where Evans ranks in yards per route run, which is the best way to measure efficiency for No. 1 receivers.

Next: Which QB should you start in fantasy this week?

Trumaine Johnson and Janoris Jenkins have both played at a high level for the Rams this season, and Johnson, in particular, was coming off of the best stretch of games of his career. And yet, neither of them could handle Evans, who has to be considered one of the NFL’s prime mis-matches at this point; a weekly mis-match that Winston is wisely taking advantage of.