In Jared Cook, the Oakland Raiders may have found the missing piece to take their offense to an elite level.
The Oakland Raiders finished 6th in total offense last season, but interestingly enough, only 13th in passing with a pedestrian 4,051 yards. This sounds a bit weird as the Raiders were known to have a prominent passing attack with Derek Carr playing at MVP level before the leg injury, but the reason might actually be the lack of a reliable threat at tight end.
In 2016, Oakland’s tight ends — Lee Smith, Clive Walford and the recent Jaguars acquisition Mychal Rivera — finished with a combined 580 yards and 4 TDs. Just for comparison purposes, the trio combined for less yards than sixteen individual tight ends. Including the likes of Eric Ebron, Cameron Brate, Jack Doyle, Coby Fleener and fading veterans Jason Witten and Vernon Davis.
This is not counting Rob Gronkowski and Tyler Eifert, two of the league’s premiere tight ends, who were injured for most of the season. Curious tidbit — Gronk had 540 yards and 3 TDs in 8 games, so in exactly half a season, his production almost equaled all of the Raiders tight ends altogether for the entire year.
We all know Jack Del Rio wants the Raiders to be a run-first team and he probably forced former OC Bill Musgrave to lean that way. What we don’t know is how far this will continue with Todd Downing handling the playbook. It has been reported that Downing will give more freedom to Carr, but we’ll have to wait and see what this actually means.
In any case, tight end production is clearly an area where the Raiders need to improve for its already powerful offense to become a truly elite unit.
Enter Jared Cook.
At 6’5″ and 254 pounds, the eight-year veteran spent most of his career with the Tennessee Titans and the St. Louis Rams. He showed promise from day one, but his quarterbacks were Kerry Collins, Matt Hasselbeck, Kellen Clemens, Austin Davis, Sam Bradford, Nick Foles and Case Keenum — definitely not the most enticing group.
Then last year, while the Rams dumped St. Louis for Los Angeles, Cook ditched them for the Green Bay Packers, certainly mesmerized by the possibility of receiving passes from Aaron Rodgers, the top quarterback in the league in the opinion of many.
It turns out that the Packers rotated the tight ends quite a bit, and it took awhile for them to really get the offense going — they started the season 4-6. Justin Perillo and especially Richard Rodgers had plenty of opportunities, which severely capped Cook’s playing time. In fact, Rodgers played almost twice as many snaps as Cook — 604 to 328.
But even with limited playing time, Cook made the most of his chances. Although his final numbers were not great — 377 yards and 1 TD — he earned PFF’s title for most improved tight end in 2016.
PFF’s analysis was mostly based on the evolution of his grade from 2015, improving from 52.6 to 79.9 year over year. The majority of that improvement derived from significant improvement in his reception percentage. In 2015, Cook dropped a whopping 10 of 48 passes, while in 2016, he caught 30 out of 32 targets in just 10 games.
Green Bay’s total tight end production was far from brilliant — 683 yards and just 2 TDs — but it is fair to assume that if Cook was always the primary pass catching tight end, during a full season, his final stats would surpass the Raiders’ tight end production by a mile.
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That’s exactly what the Raiders expect from Cook. After two somewhat disappointing seasons from Clive Walford, Cook will likely take over the reigns and should be the primary pass-catching tight end in Oakland, which will be more than happy to have a big threat between the seams.
Another relevant point is that with Cook roaming the middle of the field, not only this will give Carr one more weapon, but will also draw defenders’ attention, which will ultimately make the lives of Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree on the outside a little easier.
Cook does not need to put up Gronk-like or Kelce-like numbers, but I will be more than satisfied if Cook can replicate the 2016 production of Kyle Rudolph and Delanie Walker, both of whom had 7 TDs and finished with 840 and 800 yards, respectively.
Next: The Backup QB Competition
And who knows, maybe he’ll catch a game-winning Hail Mary in Oakland.