Stone Hands
New Jaguars tight end Evan Engram still appears to be very bad at his job of catching footballs
Full disclosure: I am a diehard New York Giants fan, the type who lives and dies with every minus-two yard gain on 1st-and-10 on Sundays in the fall. For the last four seasons, I've had a front-row seat to the Jekyll-and-Hyde act put on by Evan Engram, and let me tell ya, it was 90 percent Hyde and 10 percent Jekyll.
But it was that 10 percent of greatness that always kept you coming back for more with Engram. The circus catches, the breakway speed rarely seen from a tight end, the raw athleticism he displayed that made you forget that T.J. Watt went seven picks after him in the 2017 NFL Draft, or that George Kittle, one of the two best tight ends in football, went ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-THREE picks later (I'm not bitter).
But the other 90 percent of the time, Engram was an absolute zero, constantly dropping passes directly in his bread basket and not exactly channeling his inner-Kittle went it came to run-blocking. I can recall at least three or four times where one of his drops cost the Giants a game.
And that was but a small sampling. Fortunately, Engram is no longer a Giant, bringing to an end a marriage that was doomed from the start (after scoring his first touchdown as a Giant, Engram committed a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty). He's moved onto warmer pastures, signing a one-year, $9 million contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he'll look to turn his career around with a little change of scenery. The problem is, no change of scenery is going to help you catch the football, which Engram appears to still be struggling mightily with if this training camp clip is any indication:
The good news is it's just training camp. The bad news is ... it's training camp. The first week of it, and Engram is already making a horrible impression. We're talking about a five-yard out route against air in shorts and he's still finding ways to drop the ball. Again, I sound bitter, but I truly hope he has a great season and he and Trevor Lawrence make magic together. But if he's dropping balls in July, that doesn't bode well for September and October when it matters.