The trend in Cam Ward’s deep passing reveals the truth about where he struggles and raises a new theory why

Unpacking Cam Ward as a deep passer.

Easton Freeze — Tennessee Titans Beat Writer
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Cam Ward has had an up-and-down rookie season. He’s been in a largely horrible environment. And he’s faced one of the most difficult schedules in recent NFL history. It’s been a baptism by fire.

He’s flashed enough over the stretch of his rookie campaign to comfortably convince the majority of evaluators to be excited about him going into Year 2. The NFL upside is very clearly there, and he shows it to us at least a couple times each week. He just has to harness it and establish some semblance of consistency, which is admittedly hard to expect on this version of the Titans roster. That’s what Year 2 will be all about for the young passer.

But one element of his game has left most fans wanting, and it’s been that way all season. The deep ball hasn’t been connecting for Ward, even when golden opportunities present themselves. So what’s going on? How bad a deep passer is he really? What’s the cause of the problem here, and how can it be fixed? Let’s talk about it.

The truth about deep passing in the NFL

Let’s start here: Cam Ward is not an elite deep passer. You may only be realizing this while watching him as a Titan, but it’s nothing new. He was this way in college. He throws too flat of a ball a lot of the time, and he has never been accurate in the deep third from a statistical standpoint. Well… that’s only partially true. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment.

But this is not a dealbreaker in the NFL. No offense is built on efficiency of the deep ball, because it’s a low-percentage play by nature. Deep explosives are the killer icing on top of an efficient offense cake, not the foundation. Every season, the league-wide completion percentage on deep passes (20+ air yards) hovers somewhere in the 30’s.

What matters in the NFL is whether you can move the ball up and down the field and capitalize on redzone trips. That’s the name of the game. Not every NFL QB is great at everything… in fact, none of them are. The great Patrick Mahomes has been a really spotty deep passer in his career. It hasn’t stopped him from being the best to ever do it. On the other hand, guys like Jalen Hurts and Michael Penix throw really pretty, catchable deep balls. Nobody (who is serious) regards them as elite because of that.

Cam Ward’s real deep passing problem

So deep passing isn’t Cam Ward’s strength, it never has been, and it’s reasonable to assume it never will be. And that is ok.

With that in mind, it’s also ok to point out that his deep passing has been below-average as a rookie. It’s one thing for it to not be a strength, and another for it to be an active weakness. It’s fair to expect him to develop to the point where he’s merely fine at it. That can come with additional time on task (such as your first real NFL offseason). It will be high on his to-do list.

Before we pick apart the misses, let’s point out the hits. I went through each of his passes filed under 20+ air yards on NFL Pro and did some crack charting of them into different buckets. Here are his deep completions through 15 weeks, of which I count ten: five inside the numbers, five outside the numbers.

Now for his incompletions across the middle of the field. I only found two; one overthrow and one particularly bad underthrow (I’m still not sure if this ball slipped in his hand, or what). This brings us to the biggest takeaway from this exercise:

Cam Ward doesn’t have a deep accuracy problem, he has a deep sideline accuracy problem. Inside the numbers, I have him as 5/7 on the year. Outside the numbers, he’s 5/22.

I miscounted in the tweet below, so sorry about that. I did say it was a crack charting job, after all. But the point obviously stands: he’s not an outside the numbers kind of guy deep down the field. This small professional sample size is backed up by his much larger sample in college; he’s well above average across the deep middle, and well below it at the deep boundaries.

Why is this? Let’s take a look at these misses and try to find a common thread.

Is Cam Ward’s deep inaccuracy physical or mental?

Take a look at this film cut-up of Cam’s sideline overthrows and throws out of bounds. The vast majority of his deep incompletions fall into these buckets.

And finally, here are the rest of his misses outside the numbers: some gross drops, a handful of contested incompletions, and a couple of miscommunications.

The first thing that stands out to me is how often he seems to be pushing the receiver all the way to the boundary, not just upfield. A lot of these aren’t just deep, they’re deep and outside. And something Ward said in his postgame presser after the 49ers loss stands out in this regard.

“Just overthrew it,” Ward said of his miss to a wide open Van Jefferson right before halftime. “Tried to put it too much outside his shoulder. Instead of just throwing him upfield… at the end of they day, I have to put it at least in his vicinity to make a play.”

This is the mental element of the issue. I’m not sure if this is what’s going wrong, or how much of the problem can be attributed to it, but I do think it’s a decent theory. For starters, I’m not sure Ward trusts his receivers in this department all that much. And frankly, is he wrong for that? The Titans have decent WR speed on paper, but nobody has established themselves as the resident downfield separator. That’s what Calvin Ridley was supposed to bring to the table (and it’s why you see him in these cut-ups so often despite not playing in a while).

Right now, the guy the Titans are trying to stretch the field with most is Van Jefferson. That tells you all you need to know about the potency of their downfield attack. So while I prefer my QBs to give their guys a fighting chance at the ball on downfield passes—because deep accuracy is as much a WR stat as it is a QB stat—I also want the “miss” to be long and out of harm’s way.

But I also wonder about an “aiming vs. throwing” element to this. This is something you hear about in baseball, when a pitcher gets in a slump because they’re more focused on painting the corners than they are maximizing the juice in their arm. The general prescription is to focus on hitting your quadrant of the strike zone and establishing a repeatable muscle memory motion that maxes out velocity and spin. In other words: less thinking, more throwing!

When I see Ward consistently miss deep and wide, and I hear him say he was too focused on putting the ball on his receiver in the exact right spot down the sideline, I can’t help but wonder if this is something going on with his game.

Now, I’ve buried the lede somewhat. Because one element of this issue I know for a fact is impacting his deep boundary accuracy is physical. I spoke with two coaches intimately familiar with QB mechanics about this—one in the league, one a third party observer—and they had similar things to say about the unique way in which Ward throws the ball.

This is real nerdy, tedious, 301-level mechanics stuff that I only partially understood to be completely honest. So I don’t mention this to simply say “trust me bro”, but rather to emphasize that there seems to be something of a understanding in QB development circles that footwork and arm angles like Ward implements make it difficult to be accurate outside the numbers. This will be high on his offseason to-develop list as well.

How much of this is mental, physical, and a result of a small sample size I cannot say with certainty. But I do think the problem lies somewhere in what has been laid out here, and one thing if for sure: this will be a big focus for Cam in his offseason training, and needs to be a big focus for the Titans’ personnel department when they hunting for new weapons.

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