Acme Packing Company
Sigh.
There are a bunch of people who didn’t like Matthew Golden right out of college. You can find them online, but here’s one.
And in the Green Bay Packers’ section of this year’s FTN Almanac written (You should buy it, it’s great!) by Bryan Knowles, Golden is a featured player. The preview as a whole is very good and I think Knowles is “tough-but-fair,” and that FTN’s statistical projection for Green Bay makes sense. But the Matthew Golden stuff is starting to bug me partially because I don’t actually think Golden is that important to how the team’s offense performs in the first place, and partially because there is a TON of statistical slight-of-hand in every piece I read about Golden. Take this post for instance.
Golden had 987 yards in his final year at Texas at the age of 21. Would you think differently had he gained an additional 13 yards? Should you? Julio Jones didn’t eclipse 1,000 yards until his third year at Alabama when he went for 1,133, but that was a long time ago. More recently Emeka Egbuka hit 1,000 in two out of four seasons in college with modest 1,151 and 1,011 totals, and had a 515 in between them, and he’s a year older than Golden. Is that better because he did it twice in four years instead of once in three? OR worse because he’s older? I honestly don’t know.
But, more importantly, you should never trust anything you read on the internet as Chris Olave, drafted 11th overall by the Saints in 2022, never had a 1,000-yard season over four seasons in college at Ohio State, topping out in his senior season with 936 yards on 65 receptions.
Which brings us back to Knowles (and a few friends), who among many things, noted that there are only six first round receivers to play less than Golden in their first years without hitting the PUP or IL, captured here by Scott Spratt:
Now, while this is all technically correct (the best kind of correct), there are a bunch of problems with it! Golden may not have hit the IL, but he was hurt quite a lot. He suffered lingering shoulder and wrist issues and missed three games (Eagles, Vikings, and Lions) as a result. And he was impacted by these injuries during several weeks while playing. It’s not really fair to portray Golden as having been fully healthy with limited production. He was not, and his totals likely would have been much higher had he not been injured. (If you perform a simple proration, a fully healthy Golden would have hit 549 snaps and 438 yards.)
And the group around 549 snaps looks quite a bit better, if not great. Hollywood Brown had 562. Brandin Cooks had 533. Chris Olave had 607. And while we’re on the subject of using artificial cutoffs, the first round is also pretty arbitrary, and Golden was a pretty late first-rounder, having been taken 23rd. If we...
