Is A.J. Green finally back?
The Cardinals’ 31-19 win over Jacksonville on Sunday ended the longest triple-digit drought in A.J. Green’s career. For the first time in nearly three years, the prolific wideout had a 100-yard game.
Green, once a perennial Pro Bowler, saw his career as a Bengal end like most careers as a Bengal do; regrettably. He missed seven of the final eight games of 2018 and the entirety of 2019 due to injuries as Cincinnati crumbled into pieces. He came back to a new quarterback, but failed to develop a meaningful connection with Joe Burrow. The rookie’s knee injury meant his final weeks in tiger stripes were spent catching passes from Brandon Allen and Ryan Finley — a truly Cincinnati football end to his time there.
This left him in need of reinvention at age 33. He may have found it with another young Heisman-winning quarterback.
Through three games with Kyler Murray, Green’s catch rate has rebounded to 2013 levels. His yards per catch have increased by more than eight from 2020. His 10.1 yards per target are currently a career high.
This all begs an important question: is A.J. Green finally A.J. GREEN again? Or is this a small oasis in the growing desert of his career?
The case for A.J. Green: He’s healthy, in a vertical passing offense, and not getting doubled
Through three games, Green has only 10 catches but 181 receiving yards. Extrapolate that over a full 17-game season and the veteran’s in line for his first 1,000-yard campaign since 2017. This is a surprising swell for a player whose star dropped all the way to WR67 in fantasy drafts this fall.
Still, there was reason to believe he could contribute in his first season away from Cincinnati. Even in a challenging 2020, Green remained a reliable 6’4, 205-lb target capable of picking up tough yardage. Even if he couldn’t roast cornerbacks one-on-one downfield, he could create leverage to pick up first downs even against tight coverage:
This may have been all the Cardinals were looking for after Larry Fitzgerald unofficially hung up his cleats (like you, I am also hoping Larry comes back in time for one last theoretical Arizona playoff run). But Green’s big day in Week 3 — five catches, 112 yards — was a glimpse into what he can provide in this veteran role beyond slants and short crossing routes.
Like Julio Jones, he’s hit a point in his career where he can use his ability to identify defenses, paired with his size and solid hands, to find and exploit holes in the intermediate passing game. Combined with Kliff Kingsbury’s vertical offense and Murray’s ability to buy time in the pocket, this makes him a very valuable third option for a young quarterback still finding his stroke.
Let’s talk about the spot on Murray’s wish list a little more. Green’s newfound viability has coincided with a slide down the depth chart. When opposing defenses faced the Bengals, stopping their 1,000-yard wideout was the clear priority. This even carried through to 2020, where the Browns shadowed Green with Denzel Ward, one of the game’s best young pass-erasers, and *still* shadowed him with safety help throughout the evening.
Green finished that primetime matchup with three catches on 13 targets. It’s the worst output of his career in a game where he’s had at least 11 passes thrown his way. It was also a harbinger of things to come in a season where a diminished star wideout caught only 45 percent of the passes thrown his way.
He hasn’t had that kind of attention in 2021. Safety help isn’t keying in on him when defensive backs have to worry about the do-it-all destruction of DeAndre Hopkins or the explosive run-after-catch liabilities in Christian Kirk or Rondale Moore’s games or, right, the fact Murray can pull the ball down and run 25 yards at a time on any given down.
That means triple-digit days aren’t going to be the norm, but steady production could be. Green’s had six targets in each of his games so far this season. He’s also been targeted, on average, on shorter routes than he had as a Bengal — from 13.7 yards downfield in 2020 to 11.7 this year.
It’s not unreasonable to think he could catch 65 percent of his targets like he did in his peak with Cincinnati. Even with his current role in the Arizona offense, that comes out to an average week with four catches and 59 yards per game — not great, but still enough for 1,000 yards with the occasional breakthrough and letdowns included.
The case against A.J. Green: the teams he’s playing are butt, and his numbers aren’t all that great
Are we really considering a player who, depending on the matchup could be his team’s WR3 or WR4, as BACK? Is barely scraping past 1k in 17 games enough to declare Green fixed? How much can we really glean from a matchup against Jacksonville — currently everyone’s get-right game?
Here are the passing defense DVOA rankings of the three teams he’s faced so far: 30th, 22nd, 28th. Green has played some of the worst secondaries in the league and still has caught only 55 percent of his targets. Tennessee has given up 7.8 yards per pass this fall, but when Green had the ball thrown his way in Week 1 that number fell to 4.2. The Jaguars, so utterly shellshocked by Green’s 100-yard day in Week 3, traded former first round cornerback C.J. Henderson to the Panthers for spare parts less than 24 hours later.
If Green does build on Week 3’s success, he could run into some of the same problems that limited him at the end of his tenure in Cincinnati. Murray tried hard to incorporate him early and often in the season opener against Tennessee, but the veteran struggled to create separation, ultimately disappointing on a day where his quarterback was otherwise on fire (five total touchdowns).
Again, this was against the league’s 30th-ranked passing defense. It’s not uncommon. Through three weeks his 2.4 yards of separation per target ranks in the bottom 25 percent of qualified NFL wideouts and tight ends. For comparison, Hopkins averages 3.4 yards of separation. Moore clocks in at 5.8.
If things aren’t working early, Murray’s content to shuffle his veteran down the ranks. Green had only one target after halftime in Week 1. He’s also been the victim of frustrating unforced errors. He’s already got two drops in 18 targets. He also wiped out a potential first down early in Nashville by straight-up forgetting where the sideline was:
The verdict
Green isn’t the 1,400-yard receiving threat he was in his prime, but he’s still a valuable part of Kingsbury’s passing offense and, for our purposes, a viable back-end fantasy wideout. While his mental miscues are concerning, I’m fine with chalking that up to the last bit of Bengal orange draining from his system. Green won’t drop 11 percent of his passes going forward, but he’s also got a lot more contested balls coming his way due to his waning separation.
Still, Murray is intent on incorporating his veteran wideout into the passing attack. The Cardinals are gonna throw the hell out of the ball in challenging games, as evidenced by their 39 dropbacks in Week 2’s battle with the Vikings. Even if Green is the third or fourth man up, it’s clear he’s going to get targets.
As long as he’s roasting zone coverage or Jaguars-level defensive backs and not getting bodied by elite man-to-man corners, he’ll be fine.