2023 OL Draft Prospects Group Assessments

[Whatever]

(01-28-2023, 12:44 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Highly inflated for the LT alone? Because no other position on the line comes close to that 20 number. It's hard for anyone they draft to be worse than that, he literally led the league in sacks allowed while the run game also looked terrible. Now you want to give him a $7m raise. Let some other team start him, because then Hendrickson or Hubbard will be given a free 3 sack game when we play him.

Even if they don't get rid of him, the FO has to draft an OT in 2024. You're just pushing the need a year in the future while giving yourself worse play in the present. The FO is going to have to draft OL. That's the reality of football. Honestly they might still need to draft an OL in 2023, because La'el Collins isn't the answer either with iffy play and an even more iffy back.

That's literally not true. Boyd played 5% less snaps this year than last, and all of that is from the Week 14 game where he played 2 snaps before his finger got a compound dislocation. He plays his normal amount in that game and he's directly on the exact same snap % as last year. The RBs are the ones cutting into targets, as both Mixon and Perine set career high in targets this year, each by 20 more targets than their previous career high.... Probably because Jonah led the league in sacks, so Burrow has to dump it off to the RBs more.

Yes, cap space can be created with structure or extensions, but that tactic comes with one drawback that is a huge drawback for the Bengals. It's reliant on guaranteed money and signing bonuses. All of which means liquid cash needs to be either paid or put into escrow up front. On top of the $150-200m that's going to have to be paid/put into escrow for Burrow, the $70-100m that will need to be paid/put into escrow in 2024 for Chase, and then anyone else's contracts on top of that. Paying and moving hundreds of millions in liquid funds is the FO's biggest weakness when it comes to being able to being able to truly play around with the cap fully like some other teams are doing successfully.

You're using a 2 year number and Jonah is the only incumbent starter from last year.  Different positions typically allow more or less sacks.  Volson has the 5th most sacks allowed among G's.  Playing next to a rookie G who has struggled in pass pro is going to hurt you.  Collins has allowed the 25th most sacks among T's and Cappa the 24th most among G's.  The only one that is in the top half of his position is Karras, and that's barely at 17th out of 32.

If you let him play out his contract, you can draft a T in '23 if there's a guy you're sold on and there's a value, you can sign a vet in '24 when there should be a better FA class, or you can draft a guy in '24 where there should be a better T class.  You also get a comp pick for him when he leaves and you're going to need cheap depth when you start inking all these extensions.  

I seriously don't get the yearly obsession with drafting OL high.  It's extremely hard to develop OL in practice because you have a very limited number of padded practices to do so.  You have to let guys play to develop, and the second a guy struggles, everyone gives up on them and says we need to draft OL high again.  OL isn't a position where you rotate guys, so unless you're going to start them, stick with them, and let them struggle, they are going to develop very slowly.  I've said it last year and I'll say it again this year.  We need to spend our draft picks on position groups where we have shown the ability to get immediate contributes and our cap dollars on position groups where we can't.

Boyd's snaps have declined since the season started.  He played 80+% of the offensive snaps in 4 of the first 6 games and has only done so once in the last 6 games.   He completely disappeared when Chase was out.  And we do a much better job of drafting WR than OL.  

The Bengals have made a number of guys the highest paid players at their positions through the years without needing to drop the axe on guys for more cap space.