no more dumb road grader OL

About 10 years ago, when the NFL switched to a pass heavy sport, the qualities to have in our OL changed from the dumb road grader type to the smart, good footwork, good vision type OL.
If you were slow to get on board with that idea and still liked the 70s road grader type, here's 4 pictures to prove the point.

Picture 1 shows the rushing scheme of the Panther DL. Two slant right, with the DE looping to the left.
Picture 2 shows David DeCastro pushing NT Dontae Poe to the side. No small feat. And sighting the 'looper' swinging around for the rush thru Decastro's area.
Picture 3 shows Decastro dropping Poe and picking up the DE in time to let Ben throw to JuJu.
Picture 4 shows JuJu with the catch on his way for a Touchdown.

This play would have failed with road grader Kendall Simmons years ago. But it scores a touchdown with David Decastro.



Thus endeth this reading, we now return to your regular programming.

 

Will dissect this later and evaluate the all 22.

 

About 10 yrs ago? More like 30 yrs ago.

 

While I agree, there is something about lining up 5 road graders, with a bulldozer in the back, and just enforcing your will upon your opponent. Kind of like a Wisconsin Badgers typical offense. Going to run right at you most the time, with some efficient passing behind it. Or a early Ben Steelers. Would you consider Faneca more of a road grader or more of a technician? He was something special eh. As great as DeCastro is, I think teams feared Faneca pulling from the left guard than they do DeCastro from the right. Just some thoughts haha

So while I agree on having more athletic technician oline is best these days, you also can't just build an oline out of all 1st rounders. It is disappointing that Munchak left and the oline detiorating already. I hoped they would still thrive for a year or two as a group.

 

Everything in the nfl is cyclical. When you transition one unit to combat the style of another, they begin transitioning to counter. And it goes round and round.

At one point, the road graders began seeing bigger, stouter defensive linemen who could match their physicality. But both gave up athleticism for bulk and power. So offenses began transitioning to quicker, more athletic linemen who could pull and outmaneuver the bigger, slower defensive line.

Now we see defenses with more athletic linemen who can match up against more mobile offenses. But in time that will cycle back around as well. The road graders might be gone, but they'll be back.

Same thing can be said for wideouts. They cycle from bigger megatron types to mccafry/edelman types to combat db size/speed trends.