Wondering what happened to Sammy Watkins? EJ Manuel happened, that's what

Buffalo quarterback EJ Manuel was startlingly bad in his team's 22-10 loss to San Diego on Sunday. Let's begin with that observation.

Manuel was just unreasonably bad by NFL standards. Weapons-grade bad. Destroy-the-evidence bad.

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Before watching the full Bills-Chargers replay, I'd been primarily interested in Sammy Watkins' performance, or lack thereof. Watkins was coming off an excellent game against Miami (117 yards, TD), but he followed it up by catching only two passes on eight targets against San Diego, gaining just 19 yards.

After viewing Bills-Bolts in its entirety ... well, yeah, the film should be destroyed. Burned, maybe. Or sealed forever in an abandoned mine.

Nobody should be made to watch it, is what I'm saying.

Manuel's final stat line wasn't necessarily the league's worst — 23-for-39, 238 yards, TD, no INTs — but the boxscore can't account for yardage lost to horrendous misfires. If you'd never previously seen EJ play his position, you would conclude from Sunday's tape that he's not capable of hitting a moving target from any distance. He was fine in the screen game, and he reliably completed short-range throws to stationary receivers, but nothin' was happening deep. He went 0-for-5 on throws that targeted a receiver 20-plus yards downfield. (On the touchdown pass, Fred Jackson did all the heavy lifting). When a receiver was moving at full-speed, or even at half-speed, EJ was miserable.

From this setup, for example, Manuel threw the ball 4-5 feet behind Watkins (14) on a short crossing route:

We're obviously not talking about a degree-of-difficulty pass in the face of pressure. Simple enough concept, easy throw to an open man. EJ just uncorked an uncatchable ball.

It was not his last.

Here's the aftermath of a 30-yard attempt to Watkins that sailed 15 feet beyond the intended receiver:

Sammy, on this route, was about as open as anyone ever gets in the NFL. You'd like to think this would end in six, but no. (In this case, the play was erased by an illegal formation penalty. But the throw was still notably horrible.) Earlier in the same possession, Manuel badly overshot a wide-open Robert Woods on a deep middle throw.

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I'll spare you any additional screen-caps and simply summarize Manuel's afternoon this way: It was ruinous. Watkins had no chance, nor did any other wideout. When EJ wasn't missing his receivers, he was occasionally teeing them up for massive hits. He also handed the Chargers a late-game safety, drawing an intentional grounding flag in the end-zone. He was a mess when pressured, and a mess when on the move. And he was fantastically off-target on a critical 4th-and-3 throw to Mike Williams, when the game was still winnable.

Just an incredibly poor day from Buffalo's quarterback, as bad as anything we saw in the preseason.

(Briefly, I thought Manuel might have actually delivered the worst zero-interception performance in league history, but a quick Pro Football Reference search unearthed this horror show: Jets QB Al Woodall went 4-for-24 in a loss to New England back in 1971, passing for 20 yards. That would be 0.83 yards per attempt. Not great.)

If you're a Watkins investor ... well, I'm right there with you. It's not as if we didn't recognize the Manuel problem entering the season. The hope was simply that Buffalo could still find ways to get the ball in Sammy's hands within the team's low-yield scheme. The good news is that they're trying. Again, Watkins saw eight targets against the Chargers (one of them from F-Jax, on a doomed play). The bad news, of course, is that the incumbent QB cannot reliably execute easy throws.

The Bills aren't yet ready to unleash their well-compensated veteran backup, in case you were curious...

So we wait.

When Kyle Orton seems like the last best hope to boost a receiver's fantasy value, perhaps all is already lost.