Man this guy has a lot of threads, lol.
The mistake people make is thinking that I'm just a hater and I hate Brian Hartline. Not true at all. In fact if you rewind to about 5 months ago, it seemed like half the damn board insisted that Hartline get cut because of his crime of having to deal with calf issues that stemmed from his life-threatening appendicitis complication. I posted videos of his work in 2011 trying to show people that there's no way he should even lose his place as a starter, let alone get cut. He works the sidelines really, really well...and he gets open.
But now we're faced with a different sort of question. He's asking for a 5 year, $33 million contract and he should be looking at closer to a 4 year, $16 million contract. His talent does not warrant $6.6 million a year. It just doesn't. He's shown that by not really being a dynamic player.
He can't hit that extra gear to run under deep passes, which places all the more weight on Ryan Tannehill's shoulders to be superbly accurate. There was one throw that was probably about 2 feet thrown too far, everyone is sitting here talking about how Ryan Tannehill needs to hit that throw...and nobody (except me) stopped to look at the fact that the throw was 160 feet through the air on a rope and only off by 24 inches. You'd like the throw to be perfect of course, but Hartline's complete lack of that extra gear made it so that the throw would've had to be perfect. Other receivers that are ACTUAL deep threats have bigger windows to where their quarterbacks can get away with more.
Meanwhile, he's not a RAC player, clearly. He doesn't keep his feet after the catch. He doesn't show strength to break tackles. Think of the preseason when we finally saw Rishard Matthews get an opportunity against the Carolina Panthers. Matthews runs a slant and catches the football a few yards shy of the end zone. He lowers his head and bulls his way with physical power the rest of the distance until he's in for paydirt. Or think of the Michael Crabtree touchdown in the Super Bowl. Bernard Pollard is in underneath coverage, and Cary Williams comes down from his deep coverage, and both players converge on Crabtree to try and make a tackle after he catches the ball. They fall off and Crabtree is still standing, and he waltzes into the end zone. These are things Brian Hartline can't do. And he doesn't make up for it by being cat quick like a Davone Bess or Steve Smith, guys that can make you miss with agility.
He doesn't show the strong hands and physicality to come down with the football in 50/50 or challenged catch situations. The only 50/50 situations where he consistently comes down with the football are when he's challenged by the 12th defender...the sidelines. He's fantastic at pulling in the football with the sidelines hugging him and threatening to make him go out of bounds. But he's not so fantastic when he's got actual defenders physically getting on him. And as for his tendency to drop the football, that's pretty well established statistically but not very talked about, his drops. He's not quite James Jones as far as dropping the football, but he's not far off that either. He's lower half of the league.
Going back to the speed thing, when he does get behind the defense because he's a good route runner and a savvy football player, he gets caught from behind unless the coverage is blown to a very large degree. The latter happened against the Arizona Cardinals on his 80 yard touchdown. Kerry Rhodes blew that coverage by a very LARGE margin. Yet, even so...Adrian Wilson caught him. With the lead Hartline had on everyone in the defense, he should've practically been able to walk into the end zone by the end. But Wilson very nearly prevented the score. And earlier in the game when Tannehill found Hartline who had managed to sneak behind William Gay (who fell in coverage)...Hartline was caught from behind. Instead of a touchdown, the Dolphins had to operate their red zone offense.
This is literally where the rubber meets the road of why he doesn't have touchdowns. It's not a fluke. If you look at targets and catches from 2002 to 2012, you get 367 wide receivers that qualify with either 60+ catches in a season (2002 to 2005) or 100+ targets in a season (2006 to 2012). Only 2 of those 367 wide receivers had a lower touchdown percentage on their catches than Brian Hartline did in 2012. That's it. Torry Holt in Jacksonville the year before he retired, and Laveranues Coles in Washington when Pat Ramsey was throwing the football.
And maybe you could forgive that, IF he had shown a tendency to stick the ball in the end zone in previous years (as had both Holt and Coles). But in 2011 he had 1 touchdown and in 2010 he had 1 touchdown. You could also forgive it IF you've seen the kind of physical ability that suggests he can do this regularly, and circumstances just worked against him. But that's not the case either, as I talked about above.
