McCants: Your thoughts?

[joecrisp]

Originally Posted by offiss

Joe I know you attend the camps, is that your evaluation on McCants, that he doesn't put forth the effort in practice, or is he just a lowsey practice player?

Some players just lack focus during practice, for any number of reasons (they find it tedious or boring, they have distractions in their personal life, they're not motivated to practice, etc.). What I've noticed about McCants in practice is that he just doesn't seem to be 100% "there". He drops passes, he rounds off routes, and generally doesn't show the same kind of effort that you would see guys like Coles, Gardner, Thrash and Jacobs giving on every snap.

I know, I know-- "he was a great red-zone threat during Spurrier's brief tenure, he shouldn't have to prove himself anymore, didn't Gibbs watch any film from the Spurrier years?"-- but Gibbs has answered the McCants question a dozen times or more, and the answer is always: "he didn't play 'teams', and he wasn't one of our top three wideouts, so we had to put the 'teams' guys on the active roster."

I'm not sure what else Gibbs can say to convince people that McCants had not done anything to make himself a gameday roster priority for this coaching staff.

The funny thing is, early last offseason, Gibbs apparently watched the film of McCants and liked what he saw-- even going so far as to suggest that McCants possesses some of the physical attributes that made Art Monk such a great receiver in Gibbs's system-- and the team gave McCants a healthy new contract which ostensibly indicated the team had big plans for him.

Apparently, McCants didn't live up to those expectations last year. I'm not sure how you could interpret his lack of playing time and productivity any other way. There's no anti-McCants conspiracy here-- he just wasn't good enough.

Here's hoping all of this negative talk (which McCants apparently took note of this offseason-- witness his journal entries) motivates McCants to make himself worthy of a weekly gameday roster spot. Lord knows, the Redskins could sure use another Art Monk-- even if it's just somebody who evokes vague references to Monk. Just ask Joe Gibbs.