I didn't say it wasn't their choice. Rafael said that the primary change between 2009 and 2010 is Jake Grove, and therefore one key guy can be the thing that makes you go from being an awesome run blocking unit to a bad one. I can't agree with that, because Grove was not the one big change. Over half of the OL snaps were lost this off season. And no I do not believe Nate Garner's was voluntary after all. When I have heard the media comment on it, they have said that Garner is still not healthy, and therefore they to me they made the appropriate decision on him. Will Allen may be a different story but Nate Garner's being put on IR turned out to be the right choice.
Far be it for the offensive coordinator to anticipate team weaknesses and adapt his game plans and his playbook to what his team does well versus what it does poorly.
True on Garner. but the fact is that they took something that wasn't broke and fixed it anyway, leading to the predictable result that it was made worse. That's a failure of both vision and execution of the regimes part.
Actually it was literally broke as Smiley and Grove were broken. Thomas I did not understand, however he must have been a very poor pass blocker
Smiley maybe. but you had Garner at the time. Grove was healthy and I thought outplayed Berger both in camp and in the pre-season games. He's simply the better player. Thomas you could've at least kept as depth. He couldn't be any worse than this McQuistan charachter or Proctor. It's one thing to change one guy on the line. They changed 3 and downgraded almost everywhere (we'll see on john jerry, but wouldn't you have preferred Jimmy Graham?)
I agree with Dupree, it was broken. Justin Smiley and Jake Grove were broken. Ponyboy may stay gold, but tenured and injured offensive linemen do not. Joe Berger legitimately outplayed Jake Grove in preseason and we'd be worse off right now if we were still trying to plug Grove and Smiley in at C and LG. Smiley's been benched in Jacksonville and Grove hasn't even been picked up. As for Donald Thomas, I notice he also hasn't been picked up. He was a pretty poor pass blocker for sure, got his QB killed at times. One thing about him is he'd not gotten any better from 2008 to 2009 to 2010. He was just staying the same or even getting worse. There might be some medical stuff that goes unadvertised as well, again you notice the guy still floats around out there.
the only thing we did well, from my point of view was move the ball between the twenties. Once we hit the twenty we bogged down. Not sure what we could have done to improve upon that given our limitations running and at the QB spot. Maybe if we had designated Pennington as a red zone specific QB. I just think Henne was not going to do much in the red zone this year when facing good secondaries in the red zone. Maybe next year, not this year
I disagree that Berger outplayed Grove during the pre-season, but I am no expert. Regardless, it was close enough to where I don't understand why you don't keep both guys espescially given Berger's experience at guard. Regardless, we are swapping out mediocrity for mediocrity. By year 3, with a supposed o-line expert at the helm, it's arguably the worst unit on the team and it's not just because of injuries.
I do not know how you can say that when a linemen that they wanted to start was hurt during preseason
I don't even think the competition at Center was close during the preseason. Berger was mixed against 1st string players. Grove was mostly failing against 2nd and even 3rd string players. There's a reason he remains on the market unsigned, at his age and with his credentials.
This regime has proven pretty good at evaluating OL talent. But their free agent strategy has been sh-t. They should have known better than grabbing injury prone guys like Justin Smiley and Jake Grove, tossing away a durable guy like Samson Satele. That's been the primary weakness with respect to the offensive line, the underestimation of injury issues in a guy's history...not pure talent evaluation.
