Yesterday's "Two Cents" question sparked a frank and earnest debate about the merits of polling readers about who's underachieving this year. Readers "Allaha" and "BrooklynHorn" believe that the content will naturally swing towards a negative atmosphere where players will be "bashed" or worse yet "crucified." This was not my intention when I posted the question.
My intention was part superstition (if we call them out they do better) and partly to get your opinion about which players you expect great things out of, who have heretofore not produced said great things, keeping in mind that they are sure to do so if only BON would personally call them out.
With that said, the only player mentioned more than once on the thread, and coincidentally the player PB wanted to call out all along, was Frank Okam. This has been mentioned several times before. To delve into a video game metaphor, Frank Okam is Donkey Kong. He's big. He's so big that by the force of his sheer size of can overwhelm an opponent. This he's done, but there's more to Frank Okam and Donkey Kong than that. In previous years Okam showed great agility and moves, confounding defenders who tried to block him one on one. We all expected that this year Okam would be an unstoppable source of penetration on almost every play and even if he didn't really get a lot of tackles, it would only be because he was drawing double or triple teams, allowing his teammates to get those tackles.
Okam is certainly capable of doing this, but so far this year he hasn't been as dominant as we had hoped. Sure he's big, but he can do much more than that, and it's for his sake that we at BON are calling him out.
Frank Okam enjoys pounding on the ground between plays
--AR--