RP Clips: Big Year 2 Jump For Cam Ward?

**Alfredo Brown** (0:00)
This is Reception Perception, The Show.

**James Koh** (0:03)
Now, James Koh and Matt Harmon. Talk about Cam Ward here. You just come out, just guns blazing here. Quote, by this time next season, we'll probably be talking about Cam Ward making the biggest jump of any year two quarterback in the NFL.
And this, my friends, I think is a very surprising line, mostly because the off season reports, especially about his accuracy, have not been good. Alfredo, how do you take that, what you wrote there, against what we have heard in regards to early training camp reports? How do you marry those two things together?

**Alfredo Brown** (0:39)
My first thing I love to say, it's June.
So there's that. Also, you have to think too, everything in this offense is brand new for him. New offensive coordinator, new wide receiver one, new wide receiver two. You got Cardinal Tate and Wondell Robinson. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand that everything when playing quarterback comes down to timing. You can have a strong arm and you can be able to put the ball in a location, but it really comes down to timing and how much rapport you develop with these receivers, because every single receiver on that roster is going to run around differently. Cardinal Tate is going to run around differently than Calvin Ridley. And so a lot of that stuff is getting ironed out now. And oftentimes what coaches will do is say, Hey, Cam, we want to see you hit this really challenging route to this receiver who needs to get better at it. And then the numbers from a reporter standpoint are going to look bad. This is not me getting out on the soapbox for Cam Ward, but I think it's just it's important for us to put some context into what these OTA numbers really mean when we're saying, oh, this guy's struggling with accuracy. Is he struggling with accuracy or are they putting him in situations where we need to iron out timing?

**James Koh** (1:48)
That's not bad. I like that idea. Okay, so when we take a look at some of the numbers here, the Reception Perception numbers, again, I think they're pretty good, man. 76.6 percent success rate versus zone. That's a pretty strong number. That's similar to what we have for Jaden Daniels and Baker Mayfield last year. 62.5 percent success rate versus man. That's better than Jared Goff, similar to Drake May.
Again, he's crossing over these thresholds where we're looking for. Like you want to be over 75 percent success rate versus zone. You want to be over 60 percent success rate versus man coverage. And he's crossing those thresholds as a rookie. Alfredo, this is, again, incredibly encouraging numbers considering the counting stats just did not look good at all for Cam Ward.

**Alfredo Brown** (2:33)
Yeah. I think you're going to find that with a lot of rookie quarterbacks, right? Like those interceptions, when they show up in a stat sheet, they might as well be three interceptions. Everyone hates to see that with the rookie quarterbacks, but there were things that he was doing, and I'll keep using this terminology as I talk about these different quarterbacks, where he was just making big boy throws. And when I see a rookie, even if they're not always successful at it, attempting and hitting big boy throws at a decent rate, this tells me, okay, we know what the floor is. We know we're working with a guy that can make NFL reads and can make NFL throws. Now he just has to get better at hitting those NFL throws more and more often. And that was something that we saw from Cam Ward. He was hitting the intermediate part of the field quite often.
I just saw a guy who even under pressure too, in those clutch situations, didn't really struggle all that much. And a lot of that has to do with his ability to create and extend plays and all that. But there was just enough there where I was saying, this guy doesn't seem to get too flustered under the big lights.

**James Koh** (3:32)
There was a couple of throws here that I think make me encouraged about what the future might hold. In particular, look, I think if you're a quarterback, you've got to hit the slant at a pretty high rate and be really successful on that. 75.5% success rate on the slant route, which I think is really good. It was his most thrown route as well. It's about around league average, but still considering the weapons that he had, I think that's pretty good. Curl route, 86% success rate. That was the second most route, I should say real route that he threw, because he threw a lot of screen routes too. But I don't know. For whatever reason, my brain doesn't even look at screen routes and stuff. I'm just like, okay.