Have You Seen This NFL Receiver?

they say that in a missing person's case you've got about 48 hours to establish a lead if you want a real chance at locating the individual so can somebody please explain how a man that stands 6-4 can vanish over a year and nobody has a clue somebody dropped the ball here and for once it's not Kenny Gallade I think that young fan spoke for many Giants fans when he said do something in a two season time frame Kenny G went from Pro Bowl wide receiver and beloved saxophone artist to A laughing stock out on the street with a train wreck tenure in New York that cemented his signing with the Giants as not only one of the worst in team history but really all of pro football history in 2022 gallade's salary tied for the 18th highest out of the hundreds of receivers in the NFL with a price tag of 18 million dollars so let's take a look at players in a similar contract range like Deontay Johnson Christian Kirk Tyler Lockett Mike Evans an average out their 2022 stats receptions yards touchdowns not like insane but productive now let's get Kenny galliday's stats on the screen notice that the bars are too small to fit numbers on them I mean this is a guy who was nicknamed baby Tron for his similarities to Calvin freaking Johnson and seemingly overnight he went from doing this every single Sunday to doing this every Sunday so considering that the trail on this disappearance and potential felony robbery has pretty much run cold I think it's worthwhile for us to call in the canine unit and try to figure out what the hell happened here alright missing persons 101 where were they last seen if we go by social media Kenny made this post placing him on vacation in the Caribbean very tasteful photos I might add y'all shut the up about me now let me say it called you need to shut the up clearly he doesn't want to be found but I'm not alone in the camp of people who are interested in Kenny galliday's future I mean this guy bet actual money on him to be the NFL MVP next year he can't do that if he's M.I.A now can he so if where he's at right now tells us nothing let's go ahead and try where he's been truth is I was a huge fan of Kenny Gallade when he first broke through on the Detroit Lions which is kind of another way of saying that he was on my fantasy team for like three years straight but bias aside the man began his career by building up a resume consistent with the very best possession receivers in all of football got him for a touchdown he may have been a third round draft pick but by just his second season he was the number one option in Detroit's offense putting up back-to-back thousand-yard seasons in 2018 and 2019. if you want to be a dominant NFL receiver without blistering speed the other aspects of your game have to be polished until they gleam and Gallade could tick those boxes and even a couple more six foot four smooth off the line and ball skills and traffic that were just unmatched at his best it looked like the ball was magnetized to his gloves always pulling his hands up at the last possible second so Defenders only had a fraction of a second to react those abilities were a natural compliment to his quarterback Matt Stafford but even though Stafford would go down to injury mid-season in 2019 Galilei still went on to lead the NFL in touchdown catches even getting named at the Pro Bowl do you know how hard it is to get National recognition on the Matt Patricia lions with David Blau throwing you the ball that's like hopping in your mom's Minivan and winning the Indy 500 so with those impressive metrics heading into just his age 27 season it's looking like extension time but the front office had a problem before they could commit even with a quarterback who was willing to literally die on the field for them to graze 500 they still sucked really bad so in 2020 the controlled demolition begins Lions fans everywhere maybe felt the first positive emotion of their lives when Matt Patricia was fired but for golliday it was a totally different story his extension talks stalled and eventually screeched to a halt and injuries forced him to the sideline for all but five games but I mean that's kind of the beast when it comes to NFL injuries the guy was still on Pace for nearly 1100 yards on 60 plus receptions of course when you pair any long absence with a public contract dispute people are gonna draw conclusions of their own the Lions decided they were hitting the reset button full stop so Matt Stafford was traded to the ram and Kenny Gallade walked into a pretty bare and wide receiver Market as one of the top talents for hire but even with a number of potential Landing spots there was one particular GM who was willing to bid against himself just to lock eyes with Kenny you looking at me Dave gettleman of the New York Giants offered goliday a four-year 72 million dollar contract with 40 million dollars guaranteed the insanely bold move but I mean as long as the medical staff had done their diligence to guarantee Gallade was returning to pre-injury form it had the potential to pay off for a team that was begging for like any form of identity on offense there are probably a lot of people who look at this and say why would you give a lot of money to a guy who was hurt most the last year how are you I'm good I did the physical I checked up no problems no shockingly Joe judges 2021 New York Giants have very little to look back on with pride in fact I'm not really confident there's anything to look back on at all I seriously tried to remember how Kenny Gallade performed in 2021 and I just couldn't do it like he was a mirage Marty McFly looking at his family photos while he actively Fades out of them thousand yard seasons uh try half of that League leader in touchdown receptions uh let's try zero and look I'm not a GM but I think it's safe to assume there may be a problem if your left tackle has caught more touchdowns than your bank-breaking receiver to establish a timeline here I think the usual Persons of Interest are the best place to start offensive coordinator Jason Garrett quarterback Daniel Jones and Kenny galliday himself Jason Garrett's offensive philosophy is like watching someone get their car stuck in the mud but like instead of trying to get it out they just floored the gas pedal and pretend they're still driving I went through every Gall at a target from 2021 and my main conclusion is that if you're gonna throw 72 million at a pass catcher it should be a federal crime to alternate his usage between slant routes with an occasional curl and curl routes with an occasional slant any highlights are produced by sheer willpower alone so it's not really a surprise that his average yards per reception dropped to the lowest of his career this is a clip of golliday exploding at Garrett on the sideline over his usage something he said he'd never done before in his career it's also from week two speaking of arguing people still yell at each other every day over whether Daniel Jones sucks and he like just led the Giants to a playoff Wing So in a season where the team won four games you can probably connect the dots now Jones throws a good deep ball or does most of the time but the connection with Gallade downfield was just dead on his arrival to New York there's no other way to put it here's their longest completion of the season for 36 yards which is not only short by Gallade standards but also this isn't even Daniel Jones it's Jake Fromm of course all these surrounding factors in the world can't just absolve Kenny Gallade there's plenty of on-target enough throws that he just doesn't haul in and even when the coverage is good I mean I thought that was supposed to be his thing this is also where we have to start the dreaded injury discourse Gallade has dealt with a number of injuries over his career but the one that's been consistently talked about in terms of his rapid decline was a hip injury sustained in 2020 causing him to miss the final eight games of that season in Detroit the original report said hip flexor strain but considering the same mystery issue cropped up the next year after a full off season likely indicates there was a more serious problem even before that little peekaboo on the injury report it was speculated by a professional that God they might have sustained a torn labrum in his hip rather than just a strain an injury that differs in severity from athlete to athlete where one might just need some rest and therapy to get back to full strength another might require surgical Intervention which is the only way to actually repair that tear on a possibly related note Kenny Gallade would undergo an undisclosed surgical procedure in the 2022 offseason whether or not that was on his hip we have no way of knowing for sure so why do the particulars of his injury even matter well galaday was never an elite separator even at his Peak he ranked dead last in those metrics but his strengths in the form of chemistry with his quarterback and Hercules hands were kind of able to make those a non-issue of course I'm not a doctor and only speculating but if this hip injury continued to be a problem for over a year and a half with various treatments failing and then a procedure being needed it's not hard to imagine what kind of toll that would take on your limited fluidity as a route Runner mix in wheat chemistry and not as Surefire hands all of a sudden you've got receiver that is decidedly not worth 18 million dollars a year even still heading into 2022 the man was only 28 and still a freak of nature with a clean sweep change of staff and Brian dabel coming in to retool the offense there was still plenty of light at the end of the tunnel when training camp rolled around speculation was already swirling over whether Kenny could be a number one receiver in a thin core so when one video in particular showed him running less than full speed through drills people were a little less than charitable on social media then came the pre-season with Gallade putting more reps on tape that were also just not encouraging so before the season even began Gallade was doing himself zero favors in beating the he got the bag and gave up allegations week one of 2022 is the only game where Kenny Gallade played more than 50 percent of the team's offensive snaps posting two catches for 22 yards he had the job so what happened on those 46 snaps that effectively ended gallade's Giant's career the Giants receiving Corps was one of the weakest elements of a pretty unremarkable roster but even still Gallade does not stand out at all his releases are muddy his routes are even muddier and his blocking effort on some runs resembles Jay Cutler taking a mid-place smoke break but most damning in my opinion is the fact that on the multiple deep route calls he gets during this game there's not one play where he gets a single Step On His Defender the Giants coming away with an insane two-point conversion win might have diverted the iron sights of the media but it wasn't enough to distract Brian dabel the very next week despite the massive amount of money tied to him Gallade played a grand total of two snaps against the Carolina Panthers one two like a pro yeah I mean I told him during the week that we were going to go with Sills he acted like a pro I said be ready to go the GM head coach all these coaches and keep saying you do everything right you know you hand yourself the right way so like I said it's a little confusing if you're on the field every day and other people aren't do you think you should be running for playing time because you're putting the time in and out there I should be playing regardless so the message was sent and the following week galliday was let out of time out again but in Prime Time against the Rival Cowboys he made a critical drop on third down in the fourth quarter taking the shovel and burying himself alive on the depth chart he even went fully inactive for four games due to a knee injury but I wouldn't even be surprised if the team's trainers didn't know that when he returned he posted yet another egregious drop on two Targets against the Texans finding himself glued right back to the bench minutes after he was back on the field it seemed like golly had developed a certified case of The Yips at the worst time possible but it turned out that the Giants did not need him to recover to stack wins and as they surged out to 7-2 Kenny just vanished in their cloud of dust and he's got a completion and it's Kenny Gallade the ex-lion and look at the crowd react sure there's a little sarcasm in there at some point but were there some trade rumors I mean sure but it was a fantasy exercise to pretend that there was any interest in that contract and unless they wanted to incur 25 million dollars in dead money cutting him was out of the picture too so there he sat in purgatory the 72 million dollar ghost just haunting the sidelines and like all good ghost stories we even saw a brief Apparition from his past in week 18 when galade made an insane Circus catch straight out of his Lions days his one and only Giants touchdown came playing alongside the backups oh and the guy he bested for that catch was Darius Slay the only other player to make the Pro Bowl off of Matt Patricia's 2019 Lions so Galilei finished his 2022 season with six catches for 81 yards over 12 games and after being cut on the first possible day of free agency his Giants career finalized with a grand total of 36 million dollars paid for 43 catches and that one magnificent touchdown in two seasons in an instant he was catapulted into the top five of every worst contracts of all time article until the Earth is engulfed by the Sun so what can we make of the vanishing of Kenny galaday well if you want my take as a humble private eye I think there are always enough red flags present that galade's contract was going to be doomed to be a mistake and it's even been speculated that gettleman deliberately ignored writing on the wall regarding his hip injury Gallade in all likelihood is physically incapable of being the same player he was on the Lions and I'd even argue he was a victim of an ugly situation when he first arrived to the Giants but when you're getting paid that much money nobody's going to line up to make excuses for you you're getting paid to effectively bend the situation to your will in the end 2022 was an amalgamation of all the baggage Colony dragged through his career injury troubles questions about his loyalty and ultimately his own Pride whether golliday began the year checked out or not he wasn't playing at a level worthy of being on the field and that level continued to Decay and Decay until he was utterly broken unable to even catch a wide open pass when he used to squeeze water from Stone on some of his receptions I think at a certain point he understood he wasn't going to fit as the team's number one target or even a Target at all whether that was out of Pride or acceptance that he truly just couldn't beat out David's Sills then I think that was when the resignation really set in not necessarily when he arrived in New York or even the following offseason though the cracks were always there everyone is pretty comfortable with The Narrative that God is simply a scam artist and never cared at all but personally I think it's far more likely that not even he himself realized the toll his hip injury was going to exact on his athleticism in fact if you take away Dave gettleman's historic blunder this story quickly changes its tone from Rage bait to almost the tragedy of sorts a player who just fully lost his identity and confidence almost in the blink of an eye so whether he's currently walking the streets or a shoreline in the Caribbean Kenny G has an opportunity for that Fresh Start if he's willing he could also just never surface in the NFL again and still have generational wealth so if the cost is that people are gonna crack jokes about you I mean I'd probably take that trade so if the mystery of Kenny Gallade and the biggest Disappearance in wide receiver history is ever going to get fully resolved it's going to be in his hands to provide us with that conclusion and at this point they're not really the most dependable so Kenny if you are out there come home we miss you because most importantly if you stay gone forever then that one guy left out there that truly believes in you is about to be out two dollars foreign foreign

Channel: Set the Edge

Views: 226,238

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Id: 0rXE3z8Chwk

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023