SteelerWatch

I’ll be honest with you up front: the top nine were easy to pick. It was that tenth spot that was tough. Marvell Smith has been great, but he slipped a good bit last year. Anthony Smith will be on this list for years to come, but he hasn’t had the playing time to date that can show the kind of consistent play needed to make the cut. Same goes for Brett Kiesel, Nate Washington and Bryant McFadden. Even Ike Taylor fell out of favor at SteelerWatch after last season. Chances are he’ll be here next year, but this is a list of who is the best going into training camp.

Santonio Holmes had his work cut out for him last year. Your top draft pick always will,but he had the added weight of being regarded by most as the
best receiver in the 2006 Draft. Had they said he was the best punt returner in the draft, we likely would have lynched the football “experts” by week five.

Playing second fiddle to the most recent Super Bowl MVP, Holmes at least had the weight off his back of being expected to be a number-one receiver. Any wideout coming in to the ‘Burgh knows he won’t supplant Hines Ward as the city’s best blocker…err…receiver. With the loss of Antwaan Randle El, though, he had some big little shoes to fill.

What got Santonio on this list was his play in the second half of the season. Scouting reports said he ran perfect routes, had soft hands, had the elusiveness to be a great receiver and a great returner, and had a burst off the ball to create immediate separation. What we saw for the first half of the season, though, were most of the “cons” on his list. He had a tendency in college to make bad judgements fielding punts and kickoffs, and after fumbling away numerous punts early in the season even Coach Complacent got tired of it and sent him to the Special Teams bench. That move seemed to get his attention.

Through the first eight games, Holmes had a whopping five fumbles on the season. After that eight game — in which he fumbled twice, the second time last season he had a multiple-drop game — he didn’t lost the ball again the rest of the year. His receptions per game improved from 2.75 to almost 3.375. Not too remarkable, until you see that his yards per game went from 40.375 to 62.625, an improvement of nearly 50 percent. Roethlisberger suddenly had another receiver he could depend on, and it showed big-time in the final two games of the season, including a 31-7 thrashing at the hands of the Ravens, when Holmes’ 90 yards made up nearly half of the team’s 188 yards. And, for the first time, he was the team’s leading receiver for a game. And all he did in week 17 was catch four balls for 124 yards, including the 67-yard overtime touchdown catch that knocked bitter rival Cincinnati out of the playoffs.

With his off-the-field problems hopefully behind him and a less-conservative offensive coordinator calling the plays, Holmes is poised to have a monster season in 2007.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 6:34 am and is filed under My Opinion, Team Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.