Our offense has been this good with a bad o line and only using a % of the playbook

[Essex Johnson]

(07-04-2023, 02:24 PM)Joelist Wrote: The line actually was playing pretty well (upper tier in pass protect) after they got into sync. The blame for the early season issues has multiple causes:

- Burrow's surgery erasing his preseason
- Zac not putting the starting OL into preseason games, which meant that Opening Day was literally their first game speed snaps together as a unit
- Defenses in Cover 2 and the coaches clearly had not fully thought out how to attack it

In that period when the line was more in sync the offense was effective. Then of course in successive games we lost our starting RT, RG and LT. As a right side, Adeniji and Scharping held up okay for Buffalo then in the AFCCG they both got abused.

We have the right pieces for the line. We need to make sure this time they they actually work together enough so that on Opening Day we don't have a plague of communication issues. Also lay down the law to Mixon - no dancing. He gets one cut at max. Run North-South and hit the hole.

All that said, I do think we will be better able to use the playbook based on the draft and free agency adds.

You left out Pollack not having line ready especially in communication.

In the end teams are judged as a whole since all teams can point to setbacks injuries etc. So in the end our line rated again in the 20s on most evaluations