Value of things: Make or Break series — Tank Dell
· Yahoo Sports
It has been awhile. Summer time is really the only time I have to travel and the family took a much needed vacation to Alaska before all the craziness of training camp and work get started. This will be the final in the make or break series here before training camp and you better believe that I noticed that all of these nominees are on the offensive side of the football.
Tank Dell could probably be best compared with Lance McCullers Jr. of the Houston Astros. For those of you that don’t follow baseball, McCullers is now a former Astro and is currently unemployed. You can compare the two because they both have (or had) immense talent and they had some really huge moments for their respective franchises. Depending on your life perspective, you could say they were victims of bad luck. You could also say that given their particular physical traits (size in the case of Dell and pitching style/delivery in the case of McCullers) they were also destined to be this type of player.
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At any rate, the McCullers story is largely written. He just had one too many arm injuries. He missed all of 2023 and 2024. He was a shell of his former self when he returned. For hardcore Astros fans it was a very difficult thing to watch. The grounded and wiser fans knew he was giving it everything he had. The more emotional fans got the point of even threatening his family after bad outings. Scumbags are scumbags and unfortunately Houston is not immune to the presence of scumbag fans.
Dell’s comeback story is largely unwritten. He is participating in team activities. He is running routes and catching balls. He is doing so without pads and without the need to go 100 percent with press coverage. Simply put, we have no idea what he has left in the tank. The stories intersect because we know these are high character guys that want nothing more than to win for their team. In other words, they are easy guys to root for.
If desire were enough to make it happen then Dell would be a shoo in to get the job done. He worked out feverishly in the offseason to get back, so there is hope that he can return to near 100 percent. Of course, that is complicated by itself. One could argue that he wasn’t 100 percent when he was playing in 2024 due to his previous injury. The production from the previous season certainly wasn’t there. Was that a physical thing or was that the general malaise from the second year of the Bobby Slowik offense? I suppose we might never know the answer to that.
So, we start training camp with a number of questions. The first question is where Dell fits in the offense if he is healthy? Jayden Higgins seems destined to be the second outside receiver with Nico Collins. It seems rational enough. Higgins is much like Nico Collins in size and physical traits so the expectations are clear to see. Dell is smaller and quicker, so some would be inclined to think he would fit in comfortably as the slot receiver. Yet, he was an outside receiver when he was at his best.
One of the weaknesses of the Nick Caley offense is that it didn’t show much imagination in terms of taking advantage of individual player strengths. In other words, there were few targeted plays that highlighted individual players. There were few speciality packages that caused mix matches. This could have been a function of simply trying to install an intricate offense slowly. It could be a function of not putting too much on C.J. Stroud’s plate. It could be a function of not trusting the protection upfront enough. It could be a function of DeMeco Ryans wanting to play things close to the vest do his defense could win games. It could be a lot of things. It could also simply be that this is something the Nick Caley offense simply doesn’t do.
All of this assumes Dell is at or near 100 percent. What if he isn’t at or near 100 percent? What is he able to give you then and is that better than what a Jaylin Noel or Xavier Hutchinson can provide? Suffice it to say, there are tons of moving parts for the offense in this camp. The good news is that most of them have played in the Caley system for a year, so Ryans himself has said the offense is far ahead of where they were last year at this time. Still, that doesn’t tell us how individual players will perform.
Dell is officially in his fourth year of his contract. It is the last year of his contract. Will he get a second contract or will he be just another statistic that drives the average length of a career down? It is a violent game and not every story has a happy ending. You could argue that most don’t. However, everyone in Houston is rooting for Dell and if good vibes are enough to turn the tide then he has those in spades.