USC wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster was asked about not making the 10-man list of candidates for the Biletnikoff Award.
“I didn’t even know,” he said. “Obviously for me, it’s a goal I wanted to be at least a part of. At the end of the day, it’s where the team is at.”
Big reason why JuJu isn’t a semi-finalist? Sark, Kessler and the tunnel vision offense are gone.
In 2015, Juju caught 26% of of all completions. The year before Agholar caught 32% of all completions. Kiffin has been criticized as doing just that, direct all the passing offense through one person, but in 2011 and 2012, but Woods and Lee basically split receptions, though at the expense of everyone else (68% and 60% in the two years they were together).
This year Juju has 22% of all receptions to date, only 4% drop form the completion rate last year, but the difference is that this year, JuJu has only 6 more receptions than Rogers, whereas last year he had 51 more than Mitchell.
The difference is that Sam spreads the ball around, and is encouraged to. Kessler doesn’t/didn’t, and that is a huge reason why he is starting the struggle in the NFL — defenses have realized that 1.) he can’t throw downfield, and 2.) he tends to lock into the primary receiver.
Kessler wasn’t/isn’t very good, he’s playing in the NFL due to Cleveland having every QB hurt, plus it’s Cleveland, are they really an NFL team ?
And JuJu still isn’t a “great” college WR.
Will they go 0-16?
They could be this year’s Detroit Lions, Cleveland is awful.
Win and awards take care of themselves.
Memo to JuJu: Take care of your back, come back next year, get your degree and you’ll probably be a higher pick in the draft.
I was amazed that Juju only had 4 catches against UDub — shows how much the ball is getting spread around. Of course the blogger said earlier in the year that we had no other receivers worthy of catching the ball.
What he said was he didn’t see any star WR’s on the team.
Now they have some WRs and TEs that can catch.
Ju Ju is not having a great year, that’s it….but he is a great Trojan. FIGHT ON!
Solid response. Hope he really believes that. The ball’s getting spread around too much for him to stand out. We all see that. But, spreading the ball around is a vast improvement over the past several seasons.
I think the offense looks more dangerous with JuJu’s touches down, and I think he agrees. Anyone notice he doesn’t look as angry on the field these last few weeks. Couldn’t stand it when the chips were down and he would come razor close to unsportmanlike penalties on every play. Tee Martin and Sam Darnold have rediscovered the TE and slot receiver and you can see it in how the opposing defenses line up – they don’t look so sure as to what SC is going to do. Compare that to week 1 against Bama. They might’ve blitzed 5 times all game. They doubled up on JuJu, didn’t worry about QB contain, and never even thought about PA fakes. Credit to SC staff for really evolving around Darnold’s skill set. Receivers run hard, O-Line blocks hard, RBs block hard and run down hill now. Glad it’s no longer just the JuJu show. He’ll be fine on draft day regardless.