How Courtland Sutton takes a huge leap in his second season

The Denver Broncos are going to be relying on Courtland Sutton to give them more in his second NFL season. Here’s what he needs to do.

The Denver Broncos are expecting wide receiver Courtland Sutton to make huge strides in year two.

With Emmanuel Sanders making his way back from an Achilles injury, Sutton became the team’s de facto top target in the passing game the final month of the 2018 season, and his production was a bit disappointing.

Sutton came into the NFL with a reputation as being one of the best 50-50 receivers in college football, meaning in a jump ball situation, Sutton has a pretty big advantage. Literally.

It was such an advantage throughout OTAs and training camp, people started calling Sutton a 60-40 receiver, but it was fitting that in his rookie season, he quite literally caught 50 percent of his targets.

One of the criticisms of Sutton coming out of college was his ability to separate. I don’t know that it should have been enough to completely push him out of the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft, but it did.

Sutton is an exceptional athlete with great feet for his size, short-area quickness, and obviously an insane catch radius. He looks every bit the part of a WR1 in the NFL but his inability to separate cost him (and the Broncos) some offensive consistency in his rookie year.

Sutton averaged 2.2 yards of separation per target, which ranked 9th-worst in the NFL. Other players who ranked near the bottom of the league include Kelvin Benjamin (the worst at 1.7 yards per target), Allen Robinson, AJ Green, Mike Williams, and Mike Evans.

Let me be clear when I state that not creating huge separation does not automatically equal poor production. That should be obvious from some of the names on this list.

The big difference right now between Sutton and guys whose skills are at least somewhat similar like Robinson, Green, Williams, and Evans is that those guys all catch the ball at least 58.5 percent of the time.

Sutton’s percentage came with a much lower target rate than most of those guys, and despite the fact that his separation was actually greater than all of those players, his catch rate was substantially lower.

We rightly focus on the ‘good’ from Sutton’s rookie season because he was earning his way out there. He didn’t have to come in and be a superstar right out of the gates, but he showed star qualities throughout the year and has a very high ceiling in the NFL.

We’re not simply focusing on the negative in this piece with Sutton, we’re pointing out ways he certainly knows he can get better so he can help the Broncos more consistently in 2019.

If Sutton can create more separation and ‘win’ in more ways than just as a deep threat downfield, he’s going to be a monster.

With Sutton’s size, strong hands, and catch radius, he should be one of the most dynamic playmakers in the game at his position. He has put in work all offseason to get better, so we will have to see what kind of strides he’s made in terms of facing press coverage and creating separation before the catch, not just at the catch point.