While playing around at Pro Football Reference and came across a statistic that I thought was intriguing. In 2018, while playing with Ben Roethlisberger, Vance McDonald had 50 receptions and 33 of those when for first downs. Sixty six percent seemed like a pretty good number and was on par with guys like Travis Kelce (66%) and George Kittle (68%). That was good for 5th in the AFC among TE’s.


Then I checked Eric Ebron’s numbers and they were similar. Over the last two seasons, Ebron had 97 receptions of which 64 were first downs (66%).

In 2019, the Steelers working with backup QB’s understandably ranked low according to teamrankings.com. They were 30th in the league in first downs per game. In 2018, with Big Ben running the show they were 5th and that was with the top five in receiving yardage being JuJu Smith-Schuster, Antonio Brown, McDonald, James Conner and Jesse James.

I wanted to take a look at McDonald and Ebron’s first down production to see when and how they produced to move the chains. What types of routes were they used on? Where did they line up? Was the majority of the production on third down? Also, I kept an eye out for multiple tight end sets to get an idea of what we might see in 2020.

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https://steelersdepot.com/2020/08/fi...ve-the-chains/