The Jordan Howard 2017 season is highly-anticipated among Chicago Bears fans. The former rookie fifth round pick exploded on the scene last year with 1,313 yards and a Pro Bowl nod. Many are anxious to see what he can do for an encore. Word is he’s dropped weight in order to add greater speed and quickness to his game. A frightening prospect considering how difficult it was to stop him already.
Of course not everybody is a believer in Howard this year. James Coh, a top fantasy football analyst for NFL.com stands among them. He believes the Bears running back is a commodity to avoid this season. Though he’s entitled to such an opinion, his reasoning for the stance seemed based less in researched fact and more in a simple gut feeling based on what other backs have done.
Jordan Howard 2017 season doomed by outside issues?
Nobody is saying Chicago is going to light the world on fire this year. Then again in the midst of a disastrous 2016 season they somehow managed to rank 15th in the league. This despite a myriad of injury problems. Still, that didn’t stop Coh from centering his argument around the personnel issue.
“The Bears offense could be an abject disaster in 2017 with Mike Glennon and one-year college starter Mitchell Trubisky as their quarterbacks. On the outside, the team lost Alshon Jeffery and replaced him with … Markus Wheaton and Kendall Wright??? Brrrrruhhhhh.
Cameron Meredith is a good, solid starting wideout, but he’s not a great or even good No. 1 option. Kevin White, meanwhile, is coming off of a 2016 fractured fibula which followed a 2015 stress fracture of his tibia that forced him to miss his entire rookie season.
This is a long way of saying the wide receiver corps could be bad to very bad.
With defenses likely to key in on stopping the run, you can fully expect Howard’s lofty 5.1 yards per carry in 2016 to suffer a steep drop off. Considering David Johnson averaged 4.2 ypc last year, let’s at least be open to the idea that Howard will run in the low fours as well.”
Poking holes in the argument
This is just another example of a national media guy doing zero research to make sure what he’s saying is backed up by facts. Let’s start with his brief quarterback argument. Did he bother to point out that Howard had much of his success in 2016 with Brian Hoyer and Matt Barkley under center. That would be 11 games for those wondering. Neither of those players can be considered vastly superior in any way to Mike Glennon.
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Then there’s the Alshon Jeffery argument. It really didn’t take much to blow a hole in that argument. Jeffery missed four games in 2016 due to a suspension for PEDs. During those four games Howard ran for 364 yards on 80 carries for a healthy 4.55 yards per carry average. One of those games was played in a blizzard where the footing was awful and nobody was throwing the ball too.
Look it’s entirely possible Howard could regress a little in 2017. At the same time to say he can’t better what he did last year is shortsighted. Especially considering the fact he spent most of the first three games of his career on the bench. The Bears may not have any superstars at wide receiver, but they have a ton of speed. That coupled with a healthy offensive line should be plenty for him to do some damage.
