Will We Ever Go All-In On Our O-Line?

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(7 hours ago)BFritz21 Wrote: 1. Mike Brown never used to but I hope that this "new" front office does or at least our coaches can convince them that it's the only thing holding us back from a championship.

2. Yeah and that was with Burrow taking the fifth most sacks, the most knockdowns (by a large margin), and one of the highest hurry rates, so imagine how good we could be if we had an IOL.

Mike Brown is still in that front office. The "new" front office is largely the same as the old front office. We needed at least 2 starting IOL this offseason and we went with a 3rd round rookie and journeyman sometimes-backup heading into his age 32 season on a 1yr/$2.1m deal. Our highest paid IOL in franchise history was Alex Cappa at $8.75m/yr and there are 30 IOL this year alone making more than that. Our second highest paid IOL in franchise history was Trey Hopkins at $6.8m/yr. 

While I have always been pounding on the "improve the IOL" drum all the way back to the Palmer era, even if we had the best IOL in the league Joe Burrow will never have an extremely low Sack % until both he stops accepting sacks as okay, and more importantly until we get a new HC who won't have his QB lead the league in pass attempts while refusing to run the ball. If you throw it 652 times and run it 380 times, you're going to get sacked, knocked down, hit, and hurried a lot.