BTHOB-98 said:
The comments here are ridiculous. Clearly none of the negative people on here have played the game or even been around it.
You practice to work on timing.
Plus competition brings out the best in receivers (and DB's). We use to run drills like this and kids would have these same kind of drops. Put a defender on them and they were making circus catches. Ball is just different when you have a live defender covering a receiver. It just is. Competition for the ball makes people take their game to the next level. It's always like that.
If that's how we conduct practice, it's no wonder we are perennially middling. Yes, you practice to work on timing, but against air in passing drills, if it touches your hands, you catch it. I only played through HS, but if our receivers touched a ball and didn't catch it, they ran to the pole and back. Didn't even have to tell them, they just did it automatically. Don't care if it's day 5 and their little feelers are hurt because it's late in practice, they are now paid mercenaries. Catch it or find someone else to pay you.
As for the film, there were some bad throws that both missed on, there were some good throws that receivers just butterfingered, and there were some piss poor efforts by receivers. Personally I thought Reed's throws looked better on the whole, but when he missed he missed bad. Miles' seemed more consistent, and I didn't pay enough attention to who the receivers were, maybe he got the backup receivers to throw to, but his receivers didn't do him any favors turning good and decent passes into catches.
All told, I'm pretty disheartened by that film for all. Day 5, evening when it's finally cooling off at least a little, in shorts and pads against air, passing drills, we should be crisp as hell. We very much were not. I don't watch others teams practice clips, but I can't imagine someone like Saban would have been pleased with that when he was coaching. 8-4 ceiling here we come.