The fifth-overall pick in this year’s NFL Draft, Chase led the NCAA in both receiving yards and tochdowns in 2019 before opting out of the season as a junior in 2020.
But as training camp and preseason got underway, reports began to circulate out of Cincinnati that the rookie receiver was struggling with drops, though his coach, Zac Taylor, was perhaps less worried than the general public.
MORE: Terrell Owens, Donovan McNabb still have beef
The big difference, Chase said, hasn’t been that the ball is being thrown his way or with who’s throwing it (former LSU teammate Joe Burrow), but rather with the ball itself.
“The ball is different because it is bigger,” Chase said on Bengals.com. “It doesn’t have the white stripes on the side so you can’t see the ball coming from the tip point so you actually have to look for the strings on the ball at the top, which is hard to see because whole ball is brown and you have the six strings that are white. But for the most part, just have to get used to it and find out what I am comfortable with catching.”
However, Chase took to Twitter on Thursday afternoon and clarified his position, saying that the difference in ball size wasn’t the reason for the drops — it was just a difference between college and the NFL.
There was another potential reason why Chase felt his drops have increased.
“My drops come from me not looking the ball in. By looking the ball in, I’m talking about high-pointing it and watching it and as soon as it hit you looking away,” he said. “Me running before the catch. Me doing stuff like that and dropping it. I did that a couple times.”
Regardless of the exact reason behind Chase’s early season drops, they seem to be behind him.
But even if they aren’t, or if they crop up during the season, Chase doesn’t have any illusions about his job and what he needs to do as one of the Bengals’ top targets this year.
“I don’t want to blame it on me sitting on my butt the whole year, but it probably had something to do with it, of course,” Chase said. “There’s a bigger ball adjustment, so I don’t want to make excuses but I’ve just got to be a pro and make the catch.”
