O-lines are a funny thing. You can jam together 5 talented, accomplished guys and still end up with a terrible o-line. Maybe professional o-line coaches could explain why, but from my perspective it's all kind of voodoo whether it will or won't work, and you never know until you try it. My point here is, in my inexpert opinion I am happy with the two guys they brought in, but I personally am going to wait until they actually do it in a game before saying the o-line is solved or getting too hyped.
Besides the talent needed to make the O-line work, you need leadership and a strong culture. I'm really hoping guys like Smith and Teller can bring some of that to this unit. There will certainly be a new focus on physicality, and I think it'll suit the o-line well.
@Ottomaton and @OldManBernie I think you both bring up good points. Best OLs take time to jell, because it's learning to play with one another. I really like we're adding a former All-Pro vet next to Ersery. Hopefully, they get along and he takes the Soph pro underneath his wing. Teller has been a RG, but instead of just fitting in he's got to rewire his mental and physical skills to becoming our LG. While that sounds negative, I think in this instance he may make it a positive. Getting his leg issues behind him will be huge and hopefully our strength/flexibility team can get him right. I also love the pairing of Smith and Ingram on the right side. Ingram returning should help Smith transition faster and having Brown backing him up will help as well. OC becomes the interesting position battle potentially. Although Andrews appears to be a Popovich fav, adding Evan Brown for competition is healthy and we still have Eli Cox who they apparently liked and was basically redshirted last year. I'd love to take a guy like Keylan Rutledge in Rd2 and have him back-up both guards and learn to play OC as well. Having a guy like that as our future pivot would be awesome if he can make all of the adjustments. All of the additions we made are 1-2 year deals, which gives us flexibility, but also means we need to be developing replacements. I still see us looking at OT/IOL in the early rounds, but we don't have to force any pick now we can take the best player/fit for our team. I think we've added both talent and leadership to our OL and that's a net win compared to where we were at.
Sad but true, if I was lucky enough to be a pro athlete and I had 2 teams offering me a job and one team sucked and then you had the Texans who have legitimate potential offered me a tad less, I would hope I would pick the team who could win over a few extra dollars that at the end of the day didn't mean squat............but that's probably just the fan in my fandom Love this signing, BDN did good and I take back all the BS I heaped on him during the last 3 weeks because I have the attention span of a 2-year-old
Good find! The fact he has that much experience at LG then hopefully the position transition will be easier because he'll have to learn another system as well.
Teller is hold, injury prone and hasn't been as good recently as he used to be, but the idea that we aren't going to be better by having two new starters that are veterans and competent at a minimum is silly. The OLine is better, it's still not great.
Depends on if Teller can stay healthy. The Browns C and both OT's hurt last yr along with having Shaduer at QB can make an OL look worse than he really is.
Players dgaf about that. They want to be paid the max they can. Texans are about the same position as the Chargers until proven otherwise.
