Jared Cook's rise in Green Bay

Jared Cook’s rise in Green Bay

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000776169/article/jared-cooks-rise-in-green-bay-eric-fishers-obvious-hold-more

Why you don’t insult the Cook

Tight-fisted Packers general manager Ted Thompson held his nose and swallowed during his biennial dalliance with free agency, plucking Jared Cook from the scrap heap after the tight end tease had been summarily dismissed by the woebegone Rams.

The signing was met with snickers in St. Louis, where downtrodden Rams fans watched Cook drop passes, bungle blocking assignments and vanish from the offense for long stretches of three seasons.

Thompson is the one laughing all the way to the NFC Championship Game after Cook helped propel the Packers past the Cowboys with toe-dragging 35-yard sideline magic.

Even before Jordy Nelson’s rib injury, Cook had emerged as Aaron Rodgers’ secret weapon, stretching the seam and converting crucial third downs. With Cook in the lineup this season, Rodgers boasts a sparkling 31:2 TD-to-INT ratio, 113.3 passer rating and 10 wins versus two losses, per NFL Media Research. In the six games Cook missed due to a severely sprained ankle, those figures dipped to a 15:6 TD-to-INT ratio with a 92.3 passer rating and just two victories.

So why did so many critics fail to envision a size-speed advantage such as Cook’s succeeding in an offense that has needed a seam-stretching tight end since Jermichael Finley was forced into early retirement after the 2013 season?

Cook is representative of the analytics conundrum. Whereas baseball lends itself to advanced metrics, football is less measurable and more inherently subjective. Everything is interconnected. One player cannot be extracted from the 10 teammates aligning alongside him or the coaching staff calling plays and scheming battle plans.

All 32 NFL organizations take advantage of analytics in personnel evaluation and financial matters. As far as the on-field product, though, the frontier remains. Our knowledge is limited by factors that only those tasked with drawing up the game plans and grading assignments fully understand.

“Our game is so team-oriented. Our game is so teamwork-oriented,” Hall of Fame general manager Bill Polian explained at the Sloan Analytics Conference in 2010. “Our game is so technical in terms of technique, systems. The Patriots use a defensive system, for example, that is antithetical to [the Colts]. They’re 180 degrees apart. So they take two different styles of players, types of players to play. And, tactically, they’re totally different. The techniques are completely different. So one size does not fit all, as it does in baseball or it may in basketball. We’ve talked a lot with baseball people, and there’s a clear divergence there.”

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Polian wondered how analytics could capture the complexity of 22 interconnected players executing different and completely unrelated techniques more than 60 times per game.

“How do we measure that, Polian asked, “beyond saying, This guy can play, that guy can’t play?”

The 6-foot-5, 254-pound Cook was written off as a perennial tease because his extraordinary 4.50 speed and 41-inch vertical leap rarely translated to consistent production while catching wayward passes from the likes of Vince Young, Kerry Collins, Jake Locker, Nick Foles and Case Keenum in Jeff Fisher’s outdated offenses. He couldn’t play.

Surrounded by ineptitude for the majority of his career, Cook naturally lost confidence. He’s never going to have Larry Fitzgerald’s vise-grip hands or Travis Kelce’s lateral agility. Those flaws are amplified by shoddy quarterback play — but the inverse is true in Green Bay. It’s easy to overlook Cook’s weaknesses when Rodgers is throwing him open and hitting him in stride. Now he can play.

Cook is far from an isolated case.

DeAndre Hopkins earned Pro Bowl honors in 2015, becoming the first player in NFL history to reach the 100-yard mark with four different quarterbacks in a season. His skill set as the league’s most acrobatic boundary receiver went to waste this season with Brock Osweiler, a quarterback incapable of hitting throws outside the numbers and down the field.

Future Hall of Famer Randy Moss averaged 50 receptions, 775 yards, eight touchdowns and a 49.5 catch percentage in three seasons with the Vikings and Raiders from 2004 through 2006. Set free in New England, Moss’ averages spiked to 83 receptions, 1,255 yards, 16 touchdowns and a 59.2 catch percentage in his next three years with Tom Brady, Matt Cassel and the Patriots’ braintrust.

Just as they did with former Bengals power back Corey Dillon three years previous, the Patriots identified Moss as a uniquely talented player restrained by incompetence and overdue for a metamorphosis.

Credit Thompson for having the similar foresight to pair Cook with a transcendent quarterback capable of maximizing a specific skill set at tight end.

That’s how football is supposed to work. It’s a symbiotic relationship.