Jacksonville's signing of Robinson to a five-year, $32.5 million deal on Wednesday is a perfect example of this sort of dysfunctional thinking. It's important to take a look back at Robinson's career to put the logic related to signing him into its proper context and understand why this is a foolish move. Before the lockout, Robinson had basically been a middling receiver for the Falcons and Rams, while struggling to stay healthy; nothing about his performance record suggested that he was about to have a breakout season, which is why the Rams chose not to re-sign him heading into the lockout. After he sat on the sidelines for a week, San Diego nabbed him on a one-year deal for close to the veteran's minimum, $685,000, but he failed to make the roster and the Chargers cut him on September 3. Again, he returned to the waiver wire and sat there for days without any nibbles. A wideout-needy team like the Jaguars could have brought him in for a tryout, but they weren't interested enough to do so. Four days later, he signed with the Cowboys, who released him after a week. Again, the Jags could have trusted their eyes and brought him in. They chose not to. Dallas brought him back onto the roster a week later when Miles Austin injured his hamstring, and Robinson responded with 11 receiving touchdowns in 14 games.
Now, the Jaguars had heard of Laurent Robinson before he had his big season with the Cowboys. They had a scouting report on him coming out of college, played a game against him in 2007, and probably had a pro scout watch some tape to assign Robinson a grade before free agency. They had multiple chances to sign Robinson for essentially nothing and decided against it. How can a player whose skills were not worth the minimum salary to a team in September somehow be worth $14 million in guaranteed money to that same team in March?
Because the Jaguars got fooled by Robinson's 2011 season, that's why. They saw a player who is yet to complete a single healthy season put up excellent numbers as a second or third wideout within a great offense and mistook it for skills that they somehow didn't notice six months earlier. The Jaguars talked themselves into thinking that Robinson is a burgeoning talent with huge upside, capable of dominating teams in the red zone and downfield for long touchdowns, and they fell for that simplest of statistical quirks: the small-sample-size fluke.
Robinson had 54 catches for 858 yards last year. Those aren't incredible numbers — roughly similar to the production of Jerricho Cotchery (57-821) or Terrell Owens (55-829) in 2009, and neither of those guys got big-money deals in free agency.
The big difference between Robinson and his peers is that 11 of his 54 catches resulted in touchdowns. That's a touchdown rate of 20.3 percent. It's totally unsustainable. Since 1990, there have been 20 other wideouts who caught 30 passes in each of two consecutive seasons and had a touchdown rate of 20 percent or greater in year one. Not even one of them improved their touchdown rate in the second year. During their second seasons, those guys caught touchdowns on 10.1 percent of their receptions. Robinson's touchdown rate is going to plummet next year, and it's not going to be because he's playing poorly. It will be because the Jaguars were expecting him to repeat something that isn't repeatable.
Teams make mistakes like this all the time, but the Jaguars were fooled by the same statistical quirk less than 12 months ago! Back then, general manager Gene Smith felt a desperate need to lock up a talented young target for his quarterback of the future and signed Marcedes Lewis to a mammoth contract extension while giving him $18 million in guaranteed money. Lewis was coming off a 58-catch, 10-touchdown season that, we noted at the time, was totally unsustainable. Lewis had scored either one or two touchdowns in every single season of his career up to that point, but the Jaguars paid him like a red zone threat after just a single season of production there. The bumbling tight end responded with a number of key drops in the end zone during a miserable 2011, as he failed to catch even a single touchdown pass. Lewis's touchdown rate did not regress toward the mean. It regressed all the way past it to zero.
If that were the only problem facing the Robinson contract, it would be an ill-advised decision. If you throw in the fact that Robinson qualifies as one of the Free Agents You Meet in Hell and has an incredibly checkered injury history, it's unbelievable. Instead of paying Robinson millions of dollars based on one fluke season in a great offense, the Jags should have saved their money and gone into the market to try and find the next Laurent Robinson. Maybe that's somebody like Donnie Avery or Chaz Schilens, players with brief spurts of performance who have seen their games stifled by injury. There's every chance those guys will be as good in 2012 as Laurent Robinson will be, and they're almost guaranteed to be better than Chastin West or Taylor Price. Even more importantly, they would save the team $10 million that could have gone to someone like Mario Williams or Vincent Jackson, the sorts of excellent players who you can't find for free on the waiver wire.
