Center and both guard charts, Wade---

See previous post. I was adding them as I made them.

Thanks, Foster.

Only one of the OL whose scoring I was surprised at was Tausch. I thought he had been doing better.

And Sitton clearly looks like a major success for the Ted Thompson drafting crew.

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Tauscher seems worse than the received wisdom and Colledge seems better.

Centre is a little up and down.

But overall the inside of the line is pretty good according to this with our bookends proving the weak spots.

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I am not saying that profootball focus and their grading system is perfect, but there aren't many places you can go and get a "grade" for an individual position.

The teams obviously do that for every player.

I think a "win" invariably creates the impression that the position in question was at least "adequate", especially when it it is difficult for the casual observer to quantify- as is the case with an offensive line.

Having spent a little time looking at the scores of various players on assorted teams, I have concluded that they (profootball focus) do an amazingly good job. Those graphs are taking into account (in this instance) pass blocking, run blocking, and penalties. Those stats are also available on their site, but the graphical displays were already about as complicated as they can be.

The results are indicative of "we are who we thought we were" to a degree...on that front line.

But here's the rub. If you go start looking at other teams at the positions scored, you will find we fare poorly in the scoring. One cannot help but wonder just how good we would be elsewhere if we had high scorers on that o-line.

I just read King of SI.com speaking about AD and his offensive line. Tuesday Morning MMQ edition. I have read the thread about Grant vs. AD.

Go read that article at SI.com.

Tell me why he is wrong, or tell me I am wrong in still not being confident in our o-line, or tell me why I am wrong in being convinced that we have not seen the true potential of our running backs, AND our pro-bowl QB---

Yes, I think he is THAT good...there is UNREALIZED potential in Aaron Rodgers...but not really any part of my "argument"

This line is no longer KILLING us, but it is by NO MEANS a strength, and IT SHOULD BE. The game is won and lost in the trenches...the truism...is TRUE, with some exceptional exceptions...and that's why they are exceptions :thumbleft:

"Scoring-wise" I can pretty much guarantee that these ?10? individuals, if viewed in the cumulative, will have scored the worst (I would submit "by far") of any of our respective "corps"...Receivers, backs, DB's,DL, LB's etc.

The best part is that they are not viewing these players through my (and your) green and gold goggles. They also don't seem swayed by a win or a loss. I would submit that we are.

I am certainly not discounting our own eyes, and would say that we have a pretty high level of expertise---Yes, we really do---one of the wonders of the information age---zealots can glean quite a bit of information besides the 60 minutes we have all seen each week on the tube, and the discussions only add to an increased capacity to know what the fuck we are talking about, right or wrong on the discussion "in question".

David - Earlier in this topic, we talked about the Steelers winning 2 SBs with a bad OL. You asked how. If I remember correctly, the Steelers in their SB winning years had the #3 and #1 D. Ours is currently #9. The Steelers even won a SB with their prized QB (a guy I frequently call overrated) having the worst QB performance ever by a winning QB.

Football is a team game. D wins championships, but that's said with a big fat asterisk. A ST or a really bad O can lose a championship. Recent example - da Bears. One of the most exciting Ds I've ever seen, a D that often generates lots of points (I love seeing that). But Wrecks Grossman was so bad he single-handedly lost the game for da Bears, a game they should have easily won.

Will our OL do the same for us? Well, here's the thing. Aaron's getting better at reading blitzes and he's also getting better at getting the ball off. No, he's not a Favre or P Manning yet at getting it off, but he's getting up there.

Will our OL open up holes for Ryan Grant to take some pressure off the passing game? I'd prefer someone else answer this; someone who has more understanding of run blocking.

I will say though that I wish we had a better screen game which I've seen many times driving Ds nuts because you can dump off a screen with a crappy OL and still generate some yards when it should have been a sack.

To answer the big question of "Buy or Sell," I'd like these questions answered first.

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+2 for entire post (not just this para).
-1 for wasting your time with Peter King. :)

This is a big part of the reason academics are out of touch. They're hung up on the "expert model" and the notion that one only becomes an "expert" by "being in the formal discipline." Whether that discipline is economics or, here, football, that just isn't the case anymore. If you want to get the best information, you need skills beyond the usual set for whatever it is you are doing.

This is why Belichek, much as I dislike him, is so successful. He doesn't just get his information -- or his ways of processing his information -- just from inside football and its professional networks. He's not just a football guy but what, in an earlier generation, was called a Renaissance man. He brings to his coaching skills from other fields.

Oh, to be sure, football fans are going to be susceptible to the dilettante problem -- if you aren't trained and experienced in Field X, there's going to be some extra susceptibility to certain kinds of mistakes (seeing causation where there's merely correlation, seeing correlation where there isn't any, etc.) when you're talking about X. And if you only spend 10 hours a week (or 0.5 hrs a week) on X, you're not going to miss a lot of stuff that the person who spends 80 hours a week.

But that person who spends 80 hours a week is still sampling. No head coach "knows everything" about football. Even the best only knows a small fraction. The same with GMs. The same with All Pros. If they knew everything, they'd never make mistakes. They'd never misevaluate a player, or make the wrong call or the wrong read.

And because they don't know everything, the dilettantes and part timers may well know things -- important things -- that they don't.

In the pre-Internet days, it might have been true that the "football fraternity" held a monopoly on the information that was valuable about football success. And so, though the "non-fraternity" world likely always had the aptitudes and skills to bring to bear , they simply didn't have the information upon which to bring their aptitudes and skills to bear.

But that is no longer the case. People like profootball focus, people like foster and zombie, now have access to enough information that their aptitudes and skills can be brought to bear in valuable ways.

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I am giggling to myself to see how my -1 meme has caught on in this board.

I'm selling too of course. I think improvements brought by Tauscher and Clifton are tenuous and our vulnerabilities will be exposed sooner or later. I certainly want a focus on the offensive line in free agency or draft (or both) next year. Thompson did an amazing job with our defense -- now let's shore up our offense. If we can get this team below 30 sacks next year, I can see us winning the Super Bowl.

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huh?

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Maybe non doesn't watch the show.

I still give him a +1 for giving me a -1 for an incorrect spelling. ...in a frigging PHOTOGRAPH I posted. :sign5:

[youtube]cHHPSJ1fDH4&feature=related[/youtube]

I thought the idea of a meme included the notion that ownership/origination of the meme couldn't be definitively attributed?

Sort of the opposite of the philosophy of the OED.

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