Philadelphia Eagles beat reporters don't need to keep a tally of Nelson Agholor's drops during organized team activities this season. The wideout is doing that for them.
In the corner of a whiteboard in his locker used for inspirational quotes, Agholor tracks each drop he makes during practice sessions.
"It's just something that you want to do to make sure you're keeping accountable," Agholor said this week, via CSN Philly. "You look at it, you try to get better each day, and you want to repeat the same habits."
Drops have been a problem for the former first-round pick. While they aren't an official statistic, last season Pro Football Focus charted Agholor with seven drops -- others have him down with four.
Wide receivers dropping passes is nothing new. Some of the greatest of all-time suffered strings of drops -- several people cited drops earlier this year as a reason Terrell Owens is being kept out of the Hall of Fame (ludicrous reasoning, IMO).
We shouldn't make too much out of dropped passes, but with Agholor the miscues are emblematic of his bigger issues with concentration, route running and consistency. There was the infamous sequence in Week 11 last season versus the Seattle Seahawks, in which a penalty nullified a long Eagles touchdown. On the next possession, CBS cameras showed Agholor getting coached up -- presumably because the illegal formation penalty was on him -- and then he proceeded to drop an easy catch on the next play.
While he keeps track of drops this offseason, Agholor insisted it's not something on the forefront of his mind each day.
"I don't really worry about it when I go to practice," Agholor said. "All I worry about in practice is making my plays, and focus on making every opportunity count.
"When you're throwing the football, I try to pluck 'em. If it happens, don't worry about it in practice, catch the next one and keep working. When you come home, you watch the film, you remind yourself ... you figure out what happened there and you get better from there."
The Eagles added Alshon Jeffery and Torrey Smith in free agency, along with fourth-round pick Mack Hollins and fifth-rounder Shelton Gibson to a shallow receiver corps this year. The additions could signal the beginning of the end for Agholor, despite his status as a first-round pick with two years left on his contract.
Right now, Agholor is just focusing on tracking his improvement each day in practice.
"On here it says, 'When change is necessary, not to change is destructive,'" Agholor said of a quote from Curtis Martin that is on his dry-erase board. "You just have to remind yourself that if you tell yourself that you're fine, you could hurt yourself. Obviously, things aren't going well for a reason, so you have to find change."
