QR Week 1: Will Allen Robinson Ever Get a Good QB?

This Tweet by fantasy analyst Josh Norris neatly sums up Allen Robinson's Sunday night against the Rams, and indeed his entire career:

please don't do this to allen robinson again @god pic.twitter.com/cMY7y7PNpa

— Josh Norris (@JoshNorris) September 13, 2021

When you don't get a single target deeper than 7 yards beyond the line of scrimmage, and still barely catch half the passes thrown your way, that's a recipe for winding up as the worst wide receiver of the week in Quick Reads. And that's just where Robinson found himself this week.

The most notable word in Norris' Tweet, though, is "again." The story of Robinson's career, in four years in Jacksonville and now starting his fourth season in Chicago, is that he has been one of the most talented wideouts in the league, but he has been stuck with limited quarterbacks (Blake Bortles, Mitchell Trubisky, Nick Foles, Andy Dalton) and bad coaches (Jedd Fisch, Greg Olson, Nathaniel Hackett, Matt Nagy). Film analysts will tell you that Robinson belongs in the same tier as Davante Adams or DeAndre Hopkins, but there's little in his numbers to back that up. He did lead the league with 14 receiving touchdowns in 2015, but that was the only time he has finished in the top 10 in that department. He has only made the top 10 in catches or receiving yards twice each. The advanced stats agree that 2015 was his best year—he finished eighth in DYAR and 16th in DVOA that season—but otherwise he has never finished higher than 24th in either category.

It's plain to see that Robinson has played almost exclusively for bad offenses. The best passing team he has really played on was the 2018 Bears, who finished 16th in passing DVOA at 14.3%. (The 2017 Jaguars were 15th at 15.2%, but Robinson played only one game that year and caught just a single pass.) None of his other teams ranked higher than 20th; the 2014 Jaguars of his rookie season were dead last at -28.2%. If we weight the numbers of those seven years by the number of targets Robinson had each season, we get a team passing offense DVOA of 3.4%. For comparison's sake, that would have ranked 23rd last season, right behind San Francisco but ahead of Robinson's Bears team.

Is that unusual? Are there other wideouts out there who have played on worse offenses? As it turns out, the answer is yes, but not many. We calculated the weighted average pass offense DVOA for each wide receiver who had at least 500 targets from 1983 to 2020. Here are the results; Robinson is the big red dot on the lower left. The 14 players found to the right and below that dot are those who had more targets on worse passing teams. (Click to open in a larger window.)

If anyone gets to complain about spending an entire career being burdened with lousy passers, it's Larry Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had five different seasons with at least 100 targets on teams with pass offense DVOAs in the negative double-digits, a mark so bad only six clubs reached it in 2020. That includes both the 2010 and 2018 Arizona Cardinals, two of the five worst passing teams we have ever measured. Just take a look at the revolving door of terrible quarterbacks Fitzgerald played with in 17 seasons in the desert. The best were clearly Carson Palmer and Kurt Warner (whose numbers for the Cardinals were startlingly similar), followed by Kyler Murray, who only played two seasons with Fitzgerald. After that you quickly get into the John Skeltons and Matt Leinarts and Drew Stantons and Kevin Kolbs of the world. Consider this: by total passing DYAR, Blaine Gabbert has been the worst quarterback of the DVOA era, with Josh Rosen third-worst and Josh McCown fourth. Fitzgerald has played with all three of them.

After Fitzgerald, the next obvious standout in this category is Joey Galloway. While Fitzgerald spent his entire career (so far) with one team, Galloway was a journeyman who bounced from Seattle to Dallas to Tampa Bay to New England to Washington. Along the way he had the privilege of catching passes from such luminaries as Rick Mirer, Quincy Carter, Anthony Wright, Ryan Leaf, Chad Hutchinson, Brian Griese, Chris Simms, and Bruce Gradkowski. And then there's Brian Blades, another former Seahawks wideout. Blades was part of the 1992 Seattle team that had the worst pass offense DVOA of all time behind the three-headed quarterback monster of Stan Gelbaugh, Kelly Stouffer, and Dan McGwire. Blades also played with Jeff Kemp, Rick Mirer, and John Friesz for the Seahawks; there is a reason the 1990s were a forgotten decade for that team.

Galloway and Blades were teammates in Seattle from 1995 to 1998, which brings up another point: it is interesting, but not surprising, that pairs of teammates pop up all over this chart. Anquan Boldin is one of the few names within shouting distance of Fitzgerald. Muhsin Muhammad is near Steve Smith, while Torry Holt isn't far from Isaac Bruce. (The Greatest Show on Turf was not open for long, and the Rams were horrendous before it opened and after it closed.) Above the dotted line, among wideouts who were fortunate to play for good offenses, we find a passel of 1980s 49ers (Jerry Rice, John Taylor) and Dolphins (the Marks Brothers), plus more recent members of the Colts (Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne) and Patriots (Randy Moss, Wes Welker). There's a cluster in the middle where the names are barely legible, but if you squint you can make out the 1980s Washington pair of Art Monk and Gary Clark, as well as the 1990s Jacksonville tag team of Keenan McCardell and Jimmy Smith.

For the record, the best DVOAs on this table go to John Taylor and Tyreek Hill, who benefitted from some of the best years of Joe Montana and Patrick Mahomes. The worst go to Kevin Johnson (drafted by the expansion Browns in 1999) and Jessie Hester (who played with Jim Plunkett and Marc Wilson with the Raiders before joining Jeff George and the Colts in Indianapolis).

Getting back to Robinson: as mentioned, there are 14 other players here who had more targets for worse offenses, but does that necessarily mean they were better players? Robinson comes into this season with a career total of 750 DYAR in 783 targets. That DYAR total ranks 12th out of these 15 players; his rate of 0.96 DYAR/target ranks sixth. Even accounting for the teams he has played on, Robinson's numbers don't stick out. Consider that Eric Martin had 1,523 DYAR in 944 targets, a rate of 1.61 DYAR/target, while catching passes from Dave Wilson, Bobby Hebert, John Fourcade, and Steve Walsh for the late 1980s Saints. Bill Brooks averaged 1.44 DYAR/target for the Jack Trudeau/Gary Hogeboom/Chris Chandler/Jeff George years in Indianapolis before happily joining the Jim Kelly Bills for their last Super Bowl appearance in 1993. But this all needs to be taken with heaving bags of salt, because now we're getting into some oddball comparisons and circular logic. It's not entirely fair to compare home-run-or-nothing specialists such as Martin and Brooks to bona fide No. 1 receivers such as Robinson and Fitzgerald. And none of these numbers separate the performance of the receiver from the rest of his team; perhaps those offenses struggled because Robinson and Fitzgerald were their best options (but probably not).

Regardless, the Bears offense was terrible on Sunday night, and there's little upside for Andy Dalton at this point in his career. Justin Fields started 22 games for Ohio State, including multiple appearances in the Big Ten Championship Game and College Football Playoff; he's as ready as he'll ever be to start in the NFL. The Bears should make a quarterback switch sooner rather than later, and when they do, Fields will likely be the best quarterback Robinson has ever played with.