(Written by kencraw)

There seems to be wide disagreement on how bad Maynard’s interception was…

One side looks at how “obvious” a read it was. The guy was standing right in front of him and he threw it right at him. How more horrible could it be?

The other side looks at the design of the play and sees more nuance. Maynard’s job was to look to the other side of the field to distract the defense away from the play. When he turned and threw he didn’t see how bad it was.

I fall somewhere in the middle of those two thoughts. It was both something harder for Maynard to see than it looked AND Maynard should have been more aware of what he was doing. Both have some truth.

But there’s another aspect that hasn’t been mentioned in what I’ve read: The lack of touch. That ball wouldn’t have been intercepted had Maynard put a little loft on it. All good screen passes know that you have to get the ball over the charging linemen, so it takes some touch and good loft to drop it in at the right place for your receiver.

We saw no touch out of Maynard yesterday. He was pretty good when he could sling it in, but just about all of his misses were cases where he needed some touch to get the ball in there. The missed TD throw, a couple of throws out to the flats and this screen pass, were all cases where he needed to slow things down, take a little off and drop it in there.

So I find myself less discouraged with the “poor decision”. He’s not going to see a lot of repeats of that situation. But at the same time, his lack of touch is far more worrisome to me. Tedford’s playbook relies heavily on a QB with good touch.