The Raiders have issues everywhere on offense, but one experiment that hasn’t paid off since week one is the high volume of snaps for rookie wide receiver Dont’e Thornton.
After being on the field for 32 offensive plays on Sunday (without catching a pass), Thornton now has 197 offensive snaps on the season and just five receptions.
Thornton was a developmental pick out of the University of Tennessee that received as much hype as anyone from OTAs and training camp, but his playmaking abilities have yet to show up in the regular season.
Thornton is not a sound route-runner and has shown little physicality in his first five NFL games. Those traits shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who watched his college film.
As well as he performed in OTAs and training camp, Thornton fell to the fourth round of the draft for a reason, and he still needs time to develop.
The Athletic’s Ted Nguyen talked about Thornton on Monday, and he believes Thorton, along with the way the coaching staff is using him, is holding back the Raiders’ offense.
“I don’t like them using Dont’e Thornton as an option route guy. We’ve talked about this, Thornton, his development as a receiver is just really far behind where it needs to be and he’s really hurting the team at this point,” Nguyen said on the Just Win podcast.
“He should have caught that pass early on and that’s one of the mistakes that kind of snowballed this team… Geno [Smith] throws a perfect pass to Dont’e Thornton again on a fade route on a third and long and it gets dropped, and I think that’s when the block punt happened right after that.”
For what it’s worth, second-round pick Jack Bech played more snaps than Thornton for the first time this season (36) and caught three passes for 27 yards against the Colts on Sunday.
Bech doesn’t have the size or speed of Thornton, but he’s a better route runner and had only one drop on 91 targets as a senior at TCU. Bech is also a more physical receiver.
Pete Carroll said last week that Bech had earned more opportunities, and Bech’s 36 snaps this week were more than his four previous games combined (30).
Going forward, Nguyen would like to see Bech eat into some of Thornton’s playing time.
“They’ve got to just replace Dont’e Thornton’s reps with Jack Bech right now and just work around his strengths because it’s just not working [with Thornton],” Nguyen said. “You need to develop [Thornton] in practice and hope that next year he could be ready to take the field, but it’s just a net negative with him right now.”
x: @raidersbeat
Thornton has done nothing but why does Carroll keep starting Geno? The guy is clearly not the answer.
It’s a prevailing problem with this franchise on both sides of the ball that coaches stick with guys that are not producing far longer than they should.