Today
Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low around 25F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph..
Tonight
Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low around 25F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Updated: April 17, 2021 @ 7:33 pm
Photo by Dustin Bradford/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Like everything I write, this will be driven by data. If you don’t want to look at data, stop reading now.
Unfortunately there is not that much data available (for free) about the performance of offensive linemen. There is the publicly available data from PFF (which gives the overall rating of the player on the 0-100 scale and their color grade) and there is penalty data freely available from nflpenalties.com and recently pro-football-reference.com. There is also unit data like rushing stats from nfl.com, and espn.com and pressure allowed data that is available from pro-football-reference.com along with pass block win rate data from ESPN analytics. Unfortunately football outsiders have put all of their useful OL stats behind a paywall (power situation running, stuffed runs) so I will have to build those from stathead.com. Let’s start with the whole line analysis and compare the 2019 Bronco OL with the 2020 Bronco OL.
With only nine days before the opening of free agency, it seemed like the right time to write a primer on what’s ahead for George Paton. With an injury-marred, 5-11 season in the rearview and Patrick Mahomes between them and the playoffs, the Broncos have their work cut out for them this off-season.
Credit to both Bernd Buchmasser and rcon14 for the inspiration and framework below.
NFL Cap Situation
As I write this, we still don’t know the official cap ceiling, though I suspect that changes this week. We do know that the cap ceiling can not be lower than $180 million and that it’d be a significant decline from 2020’s $198.2 million.
Keep him around these hills for another season.
Anything less than awesomeness, and it s time for the expensive and no-show right tackle to go.
“(James) has a lot of work to do to get where he needs to be, and I know he’ll do that,” standout left tackle Garett Bolles said last season.
I don’t know he’ll do that. Do you? Nobody here has seen James do that. Two years into a contract worth $51 million when he signed it, James has earned roughly $272,222 for each of the 63 snaps he’s taken as a Bronco.
I know, right? How do these guys ever survive?
Where in the Draft Can You Find Good OLs? By TarkentonToJones on Feb 27, 2021, 9:34pm EST +
A month or so ago, I looked at where good WRs come from in the NFL draft. The answer was that the great WRs are usually found in rounds 1, 2, and 3, with round 2 not being much worse than round 1. Many Giants fans want the team to draft OLs in the first two rounds despite us taking OLs in rounds 1,3,5 last year. What do previous drafts have to tell us about this?
As before, I used the Pro Football Reference Approximate Value (AV) metric to judge good (AV = 5 or more per year) and elite (AV = 10 or more per year) players. Unlike PFF scores, that are just based on how well the player plays when he plays, AV is affected by how many games a player plays as well. Here are the results (elite players in