Seahawks: Jaron Brown is balling out in a big way

The Seahawks have plenty of competition at wide receiver. One of the best candidates for 2019 was almost forgotten in the offense of 2018.

The Seahawks have some big cleats to fill since Doug Baldwin left the team. I have some ideas on who might step up to help fill the leadership void – notice, I said “help” fill, because no one is Angry Doug. As a receiver, it looks like there may be a darkhorse candidate in the race to step in for Baldwin’s production. Seattle had a great candidate on the team before the draft in Jaron Brown.

We’ve written before that Brown seemed to be underused by Seattle’s offense, given his success when they looked his way.  As I wrote in a piece on possible free agent receivers, Brown caught 14 of 19 targets and turned those into 166 yards and five touchdowns. Russell Wilson called his number six times in the red zone in 2018. Brown only caught all six and scored five times.

Why was Brown targeted just 19 times? It seems the Seahawks are wondering about that themselves. Kind of like them forgetting they had Chris Carson was on the team. At least they corrected it with Carson. Here’s Brown’s game log for last season. He was targeted eight times in the first three games. Brown converted those into six catches and a score. It took Seattle three weeks to call his number again. One target in the red zone, one catch, six points.

Seattle Seahawks

Seahawks could have used Brown more, but this is a new year

The Seahawks ignored him for another week, then went to him twice in the Chargers game. Brown made one catch, surprise surprise, in the red zone for a touchdown. Brown’s reward was to be completely forgotten for two more weeks. Seattle tried him once against the Panthers, but he couldn’t bring the pass in. Someone on the staff clearly made a mistake, because they went right back to Brown the very next week. Brown had his best game of the year versus the Niners as he hauled in all three targets for 67 yards and two touchdowns.

Despite this performance, Brown saw just four targets in the last four games of 2018. I get it, to a degree. The Seahawks were in their playoff push, and they were going to hit Angry Doug as much as possible. Baldwin scored four of his five touchdowns in the final four weeks. Tyler Lockett was having one of the great stealth seasons in league history. We can’t forget, David Moore to that point was sensational.

With four weeks left in the season, Moore looked like the next Doug Baldwin. I’m not backing down from that, but he clearly has work to do. But after the Panthers game, no one doubted this guy’s future. Moore saw one target in the first three games. That’s entirely due to the noble but failed Brandon Marshall Experiment. Over the next eight games, Moore caught 22 of 36 targets for 413 yards and five scores. I can see why the Hawks kept going to him. But surely by the time that Moore was one for eight, you could have looked Brown’s way a couple more times.

Brown was never going to see 50 targets last year; I get it. But 50 is a reasonable number to target this year. He’s bulked up for 2019, as he discussed with the great John Clayton. I may have been too hasty when I predicted the receiver depth chart. Of course, that’s part of the fun. As Brown said to Clayton, “It’s a competition…in the end, it’s going to make our team better.”