Offensive line allowing too much banging for the bucks

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/07/2015 (3755 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At this juncture, the argument over which quarterback should be No. 2 for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers — as obvious as that is — is still a point we shouldn’t even be discussing.

No, what we should be is proactive instead of reactive, and be concerned about the fact that the team invested over three quarters of a million dollars into preventing the scenario that we are seeing unfold for the second time in five weeks.

Quite frankly, Drew Willy is not supposed to get the $&#% kicked out of him anymore. That was the idea when GM Kyle Walters opened the purse strings this off-season and acquired the most expensive security detail he felt he could find.

As I noted in a prior column, this bunch showed up eager for work in Week 1, where they kept Willy so clean and upright that equipment manager Brad Fotty simply folded up his jersey instead of washing it for the next game, as they performed like who we thought they were. They ran the ball for more than a 100 yards, and gave Willy so much time in the pocket he got caught up on Netflix, and finished the game with a perfect passer rating.

Yet for every game since but one, they have progressively given up more sacks, and Saturday night was the second time their franchise QB has had to be peeled off the field.

While simply tallying up QB kills is a flawed way of accounting for any offensive line’s productivity — unless we are talking about the kind of numbers (71 sacks against) that were surrendered last year — it hasn’t just been about how many times he’s been dropped on his head. Not only has the feature back of the day not come close to breaking the 100-yard barrier since that fabled Week 1, but multiple opponents have gotten to Willy with three-man pressures, and on the play where he was hurt in the loss to the Edmonton Eskimos, merely a four-man rush.

Giving up sacks, pressures, and hits when it’s five offensive linemen against three rushers, or even four against five, isn’t what you expect when you spend this kind of money on players and their coach. This is a far better group than what we lived through last season, but they still have a ways to go to win the cost-benefit analysis.

Close to a third of the way through the season, the problem with the offensive line appears to be that when the team has been at the gym, lifting weights and doing one-arm curls and snatches, they’ve forgotten to work on their right arm as hard as the left. At right tackle, while I don’t know what happened to the much-heralded Marc Dile, and haven’t watched extensive film on Devin Tyler, or Jace Daniels, I do know for a fact that Glenn January, the three-time divisional all-star and the club’s nominee for most outstanding lineman the last three years, who can play on the right side but was let go, was better than all three.

If you’re going to pay two players a $100,000 and change each to watch, like the club is currently doing, you might have better spent it on any number of proven import veterans to lock down the right side.

And while Sukh Chungh has a tremendous future in front of him, and is gaining invaluable experience from his opportunity to start, he is still a rookie, and rookies make more mistakes than veterans do.

The club is essentially paying close to a quarter of a million dollars for Patrick Neufeld and 2014 first-round draft pick Matthias Goosen to watch him progress, as Willy experiences any and all of the requisite growing pains.

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When you have a relatively immobile passer at the helm of the ship, who only plays at an elite level when given sufficient time in the pocket, you can’t afford to roll the dice on your protection. For the money that is being spent on Tyler, Daniels, Neufeld and Goosen, you can’t tell me that the depth charts that we have seen for the first five games on the right side, are comprised of the best guard and tackle tandem that is possibly available.

Going into Week 6, from the periphery looking in, it seems like better appropriations on drafting and spending might have prevented this franchise from being in the position it finds itself today: Waiting to find out how long — for the second time in the last four weeks — their most valuable player will be out for.

Doug Brown, once a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.

Twitter: @DougBrown97