Offensive Offenses

We are through the first two weeks of the NFL season, and some trends are starting to emerge. The AFC West is really good. The Colts literally do not have a single good player outside Andrew Luck. And the Jets are an absolute abomination (though I guess we knew that one before the season started).

But one of the clearest trends across the league has been the struggles of offenses. Through the first two weeks teams are averaging 20.2 points per game, more than a 10 percent drop from last year’s average through two weeks of 22.5. Two points a game doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is clear from watching a number of teams that something is very wrong with offenses across the league.

If you look towards the bottom of the league in points scored, you see some expected teams. Everybody knew the 49ers were going to tear things down (this was written before they put up 39 points on Thursday, but I’m going to stick with it), and the mess that Bill O’Brien has made of the quarterback position makes it unsurprising to see the Texans near the bottom as well. But it does raise some eyebrows to see the Bengals, Giants, and Seahawks rounding out the bottom five, three teams with recent playoff experience and proven quarterbacks under center.

There is a very clear thread that connects these three teams, one that is fairly obvious to anyone who pays much attention to the NFL. Coming into the season we knew that all three would struggle along the offensive lines, and so far our expectations have been met. The Bengals lost two big money veterans to free agency. The Giants are trotting out a human revolving door at left tackle. And the Seahawks are sticking to the same flawed philosophy they’ve failed with for years, that they can plug any big athlete in along the line and let Tom Cable coach them into actual NFL players.

None of this is news, and neither is the drop in offensive line quality across the league. Even scanning farther up the list we can find offenses that have struggled this year because of troubles on the offensive line. Carolina won their first two games, but they did so in thoroughly unimpressive style. The Cardinals can’t keep their veteran quarterback upright long enough to take the deep shots their offense is built around. And even Green Bay, with the best quarterback in the league, struggled to move the ball against a mediocre Falcons defense after losing their two starting tackles.

Never before have we seen so clearly how much the lack of an offensive line can disrupt a quarterback. Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, and Cam Newton are all top ten quarterbacks in the league. Carson Palmer and Eli Manning are competent starters, and Andy Dalton has played in the NFL for six years. And yet, in an era that is supposed to be defined by quarterbacks, these teams are consistently failing to move the ball.

The offensive line woes in the league have become extremely apparent this year, but this is a story that has been developing for the past several seasons. Offensive line play has been trending downhill, and most of the blame has gone (deservedly so) to the college system.

NFL offenses have become significantly more spread out over the past ten years, but they still hold nothing on the college game. Almost every college team runs almost exclusively from the spread formation, with receivers stretching sideline to sideline and the quarterback taking the snap from shotgun. Offensive linemen line up with wide splits standing in two point stances, trained to move side to side more than down the field. Blocking in college football has become less about moving someone to somewhere else and more about letting their motion carry them out of the play while the running backs and quarterbacks move into the open space.

The NFL’s adoption of the spread has been slower and more muted, and even advanced spread teams still ask much more from their offensive linemen than any college system. Where college teams tore up the playbooks and rebuilt them from scratch, NFL teams have simply tried to adjust the same things they’ve always done to fit into a spread template.

Offensive linemen are coming into the NFL less prepared than ever to play the position, and the problem has only be exacerbated by the explosion in defensive line talent. As the passing game has become the dominant means of moving the ball, the ability to pressure the quarterback has become much more valuable. The highest paid players on defense are along the line, and now the dominant young athletes gravitate towards these positions. Throughout NFL history the standard template has been to play a couple of pass rushing ends with a pair of run stuffing tackles, but over the past few years the ability to stop up the middle has been sacrificed for athletic penetrators who can disrupt the passer.

The role of the offensive line has changed in the NFL, and the talent has not kept up with it. The simple, unavoidable fact is that there aren’t enough NFL caliber offensive linemen making their way through the college system. And with NFL practice limited by the most recent CBA, it has become very difficult to shape raw athletes like Greg Robinson and Ereck Flowers into capable NFL players.

The lack of line talent is a serious issue the NFL is going to have to face, and I can see a few possible solutions to it. Some of these are more useful to the teams involved than others (and of course the solution for a team like Green Bay is just to get healthy). And there are obvious drawbacks with each of these options, but when the current strategies keep failing it becomes a necessity to try something new.

Option 1: Invest

This seems like the most obvious answer, but it has also proven to be the most effective. NFL teams have finite resources, and it’s up to them where to target these resources on their roster. Seattle is the perfect example of a franchise that has built up the rest of their team at the expense of their offensive line. They are the only team spending less than 10 percent of the salary cap on offensive line, and that is actually a significant jump from last year, when their offensive line spending was less than half of the next lowest team.

If you look on the other end of that chart, you will see that the most expensive line in the league belongs to Oakland, who spends more than 26 percent of the salary cap on the offensive line. Not coincidentally, Oakland also leads the league with 71 points scored over the first two weeks.

Oakland’s offensive line splurge began in 2015 when they brought center Rodney Hudson over from division rival Kansas City with a 5 year contract worth $44.5 million. They went even bigger the next year, giving the biggest contract of all time to an offensive guard with 5 years and $55.8 million to Kelechi Osemele. And then for good measure, this past offseason they extended guard Gabe Jackson for 5 years and $55 million.

Oakland gave a lot of money to Derek Carr, but after him the next three highest paid players on their team are their three interior linemen. In a league where quality offensive linemen are a rare commodity, the ability to own three top notch players carries extra value. The same thing can be seen with the draft picks invested by Dallas and Tennessee. The Cowboys have three first round picks starting on their offensive line, plus a fourth player who was a first rounder on talent. The Titans don’t have the same success rate as the Cowboys, but they have spent three top-11 picks on offensive linemen in the past five drafts, two of which are now starting at tackle.

It seems obvious to just throw money and draft picks at the problem, but of course it isn’t that simple. Between 2013 and 2015 the Giants spent two first round picks and a second round pick on offensive linemen, and it hasn’t saved them from being a disaster in pass protection. The Bengals tried as well, knowing their veterans would be moving on and spending their first two picks in 2015 on linemen. But both Cedric Ogbuehi and Jake Fisher have been disappointments to begin their careers, and there is little reason to believe they will turn things around.

And while the Raiders did a good job throwing this money out before other teams realized that linemen are now so thin in supply, the financials around free agent linemen have changed over the past couple years. Matt Kalil got $55 million from Carolina this year, and so far he has been the biggest problem along their offensive line. The market for offensive line talent is a sellers’ market right now, and unless a team is overwhelmed with cap space like Cleveland, they simply will not be able to compete.

Option 2: Wait it Out

This obviously isn’t a great solution for teams like the Seahawks and Panthers, with franchise quarterbacks and a championship window. It’s not great either for the Giants or the Cardinals, two teams trying to find one last run with their aging quarterbacks. But for the league as a whole, predictions of the death of the offensive lineman may prove premature.

There is an inherent cyclicality to positional scarcity in the NFL. Every few years we hear a similar story, about how the league is facing a serious shortage of talent at a specific position. In recent memory we heard all about how the running game was disappearing, and how the rise of the passing game had brought an end to the feature back.

So what happened? Have we found ourselves out of running backs? No, we haven’t. In fact, we are seeing one of the best groups of young running backs in NFL history. The passing game changed the way that running backs are used, and it made it harder to just line up in I-formation and pound the ball downhill. Running backs who fit that style slowly faded from the league, and the young players who had been raised their entire lives to play with this style found themselves without a role.

Young athletes are smarter than we give them credit for. They saw the way the league was trending, and they adapted. We may have seen the last of players like Adrian Peterson, Shaun Alexander, and Jerome Bettis, but in their place we have ended up with players like Le’Veon Bell, David Johnson, and Ezekiel Elliott. Young running backs saw the way the league was shifting, and they developed their skills to match the new demands of the NFL. The backs coming into the league these days are all comfortable as receivers, and many have worked hard to excel in pass blocking as well.

The same thing is going to happen on the offensive line. It may not be as much of a stylistic change as it is a shift in priorities, almost an unwinding of the trend we’ve seen of big athletes moving to the defensive side of the ball. NFL prospects are very aware of who is getting paid what in the league, and with the contracts handed out to offensive linemen over the past couple years, that position has become a lot more appealing. Now when a 6-6 270 pound high schooler starts looking at colleges, he’ll make up his mind that he wants to play offensive tackle, rather than trying his hand rushing the passer.

The talent pool has run a little dry among offensive linemen, but it isn’t going to last. Five or ten years down the road the league will be flush with spectacular athletes lining up to protect the quarterback, and we’ll find a new position to fret over. In the long run, everything will work out. Of course, that doesn’t help the teams right now stuck with miserable talent. Which brings us to the last and best option.

Option 3: Adapt

NFL coaches are some of the most stubborn men in the world. Every one of them believes that they are smarter than everybody else around them, and they all know that their system is responsible for getting them where they are. And so they are going to stick with their system, and if it fails it’s because the players are not executing their plans properly.

Change comes much faster to college football than to the NFL. Part of it is the turnover of the players. College teams lose half their starters every year, and they never stick with anyone longer than four seasons. NFL teams can have the same quarterback for more than ten years, and it’s harder to change things with an established veteran running the offense. So even as NFL offenses have spread out, they’re still running the same route combinations and asking their quarterbacks to make the same reads.

This has worked for the NFL for close to a decade now, but we may be reaching a breaking point. As more players enter the league from these spread attacks in college, the league is going to have to adopt even more of those schemes as well.

If Oakland is a perfect example of investing in their offensive line, then their division rivals in Kansas City are a great example of a team adapting to fit their new talent. The Chiefs are better on the offensive line than most of the other teams we’ve talked about, but given the talent on this offense it is shocking that they’re the second highest scoring team through two weeks. And most of the credit for that goes to their head coach Andy Reid, who has drastically shifted his offense in the offseason to embrace the college style.

Kansas City’s offense looks nothing like any other in the league. Every play comes with extensive motion before the snap, slot receivers running back and forth down the line to knock the defense off balance. The Chiefs have taken Reid’s West Coast NFL offense and added college flairs like jet sweeps, read options, and multiple fakes. Defenses will begin to adjust, but for now there is little they can do, and it’s possible that Kansas City can sustain this level of performance.

For teams like Seattle, Carolina, and New York with hopes to compete this year, this is the best solution to fix their offensive line woes on the fly. But just because it’s the best option, that doesn’t make it a good option. Because to make this college style work they need talent on the rest of their offense, talent they may not have.

Seattle and Carolina face a challenge in that their offenses are just as barren on the outside as they are in the middle. Both teams have built their entire offensive systems around attacking deep down the field, and that extends to the talent at receiver as well as their strong armed quarterbacks. The best way to compensate for a weak offensive line is to get the ball out of the quarterback’s hands before the pass rush can close in, but that only works if the quarterback can find an open receiver before the ball is even snapped. And that requires a quarterback to trust that his receivers can win against man to man coverage, a risky prospect for teams throwing to Kelvin Benjamin and Paul Richardson.

The problem is on the other end of the equation in New York. Odell Beckham and Sterling Shephard can win off the snap of the ball, but Eli Manning is part of the old school quarterback style that doesn’t fit well with modern NFL schemes. The Giants run three receivers as much as anyone, but their route combinations require the quarterback to hold the ball three or four seconds to get his receivers open, time the offensive line is not capable of providing. The Giants can try to adjust, and they have made some progress since Ben McAdoo took over their offense. But there may be only so far that they can go with these changes playing Manning at quarterback.

I don’t know what the answer is for New York, but there may be hope for Seattle and Carolina if they are willing to embrace the college style in the running game. Newton and Wilson are two of the most mobile quarterbacks in the league, and they can slow down pass rushes with even more designed runs and read options. Both quarterbacks are struggling with injuries, so their teams want to protect them, but at this point they may not have any other options.