Downtown Reggie Brown

Back in August, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post titled "Should the Eagles Trade for Todd Pinkston."  The gist was that Eagles fans were getting all excited about Ashley Lelie, whose career numbers were only somewhat better than Pinkston's and who would have played a pretty similar role in this offense.

The funny thing is that Lelie's name came up again as I was doing some research for a piece on Eagles wide receiver Reggie Brown.  Through six games, Brown has an interesting stat line:

	Rec	Yds	Avg	TD	Long
Reggie Brown	21	412	19.6	4	60

That's a whole lotta yards on not that many receptions.  Just for fun, I extrapolated his numbers over a 16-game season and then went looking for a receiver in recent years who had a similar season.  Guess who came up:

	Year	Rec	Yds	Avg	TD	Long
Ashley Lelie	2004	54	1084	20.1	7	58
Reggie Brown	2006	56	1099	19.6	10.7	60

Lelie didn't play much his first year in the league, but in 2003 he started 10 games and showed enough promise that by 2004 he was the starter opposite the venerable Rod Smith.  Brown might have been on a similar path, but last year's TO blow-up accelerated his participation in the offense and he ended up starting in 11 games.  This year he's a full-time starter.

Now I don't think there's any way Brown sustains this kind of pace.  That 19.6 yard-per-catch number is particularly high.  And once Stallworth comes back healthy, there may not be enough passes to go around to all the Eagles weapons, no matter how much Andy likes to throw. 

Nonetheless, it's an interesting comparison.  Of course, that season Denver also had Rod Smith catch 79 passes for 1144 yards.  I wouldn't mind having an Eagles version of him on the team this year...