Been that way since college. If you need him to run in a straight line and beat his man he can do that all day and tomorrow, can't reliably do more
Obviously he's grown since then and since draft interviews when he was sitting down with teams shirtless like he was distracting them from his poor route tree lol. He just doesn't have the tools besides the physical to be a top guy and nobody talks about him like that so it's fine, but he's Seattle's #1 so it's a problem. Looking at him you'd think he'd do more, punish DBs more with size & strength, be a high end AJ Brown or something. He's 3 inches taller than AJ
Dwight Howard of receivers. One of the strongest & most athletic at the position, make big plays off raw athletics, no subtitles to speak of and no real bread and butter shyt you can run when the big shyt just isn't there
JJ, Chase, Lamb, guys like Kupp & Nacua when healthy etc, there's plenty of things underneath you can go to with them to keep the defense aware and keep chains moving, you can rely on it. Metcalf doesn't have that and Lockett at this point seems to only mostly show up on chunk plays like DK so 2 chunk guys & 1 underneath whose not quite there (JSN). Doesn't look good