It’s pretty easy to forget after a tough season just how good a player like Jeremy Hill really can be. For all the fumbles, the weird East-West running, and the Fantasy Football heartbreak, this after all could have just been a sophomore slump.
Let’s not forget that towards the end of the season and before the daunting fumble in the playoffs against the Steelers that Jeremy Hill was really turning it on again. If you go back to week 12 against the St. Louis Rams and forward, Hill really only had two performances for the Bengals in that stretch that were less than ideal, the games against the Steelers and 49ers.
Yes, he was definitely outplayed this year by Giovani Bernard, and it seemed like his best work was getting the ball at the one yard line and just running into the end zone, but we can’t just quit on the guy after a rough second season, can we?
The drop in yards per carry are really eye opening and so is the lack of focus on carrying the football, but these are certainly things that are fixable moving forward, especially for a back that is about to head into his third season of his young NFL career.
The Jeremy Hill we saw in his rookie year wasn’t a flash in the pan by any means. He is too talented to not return to the player he was in 2014. There have been a lot of players who bounce back from terrible seasons and have very solid careers in the NFL and Hill should fall under that category, when all is said and done.
We all have seen Jeremy Hill react to the Playoff game after his fumble and the domino effect of disaster that shortly followed. His tweet blaming himself for the loss was should make him more determined than ever, plus he’s not exactly the first running back with fumbling issues in the league, right Adrian Peterson?
In year three, Jeremy Hill will once again be a play maker for this offense. He will hit holes aggressively, he will make short runs big gains and we will continue to see him evolve as a good, not great pass catching option out of the backfield. Why do I feel this way? Well simply, he doesn’t exactly have a choice.