First of all, you have to understand how inconsistent punt/kick return
touchdowns are from year to year. Remember when people thought Dante
Hall was an MVP candidate? That lasted a year and a half. For Peterson
to fall off isn't a huge shock, although he's fallen a lot more than I
would have expected.
Are teams avoiding him? On first glance, this seems to be the case.
Arizona is second in the league when you look at their opponents'
gross punt value (-5.4 points). However, there are two interesting
notes here: One goes against the idea of people kicking short to
Peterson, and the other says they've stopped doing it.
The team leading the league in opponent's gross punt value is Tampa
Bay. How scared are you of Roscoe Parrish? Yeah, that's right, not
very. Third is SD, another team not known for great punt returns. But
4th is Chicago, so maybe there is something to this idea.
Then I split things up between Weeks 1-7 and Weeks 8-14. In Weeks 1-7,
opponent gross punt value against Arizona is -6.5 points. In Weeks
8-14, it is 1.1 points. In other words, if this truly is caused by
opponents trying to prevent strong returns by Peterson, they clearly
stopped trying sometime around midseason when it was clear Peterson
wasn't having the kind of year he was last year. Partly, that's
probably natural variation in Peterson's performance. He's not really
as good as he looked last year, not really as bad as he looks this
year. It's also possibly related to changes on the coverage team for
Arizona. Maybe the guys on the bottom of this year's roster don't
block as well as the guys on the bottom of last year's roster.
Whatever the issue, it just isn't happening for the guy this year.
Peterson already has six fumbles: four muffs and two outright fumbles
after he actually began a return. His longest return is 26 yards, and
he has three returns that actually lost yardage.