FanPost

Offensive Line comparison to the Champs

Its no secret, especially to Cowboy fans, that our offensive line is our weak link, possibly preventing our team from achieving great success this year. Like many fans, I've been worried sick over this position ever since the season ended. Signing Fabini and Kosier seemed okay, but I thought the Cowboys would continue to upgrade through the draft. Well, as everyone knows, the Cowboys didn't draft any linemen high and went other directions. At that time I thought to myself, we're really stacked with young studs on defense, have the best collection of skill position players since our dynasty of the '90's, but the line looks so weak and could be our downfall. So I thought, well, with Adams coming back (hopefully healthy) and Fabini and Kosier in the mix, is our line really better than last year? How does it stack up to other lines on good teams?

So I did some research and came away with some interesting findings. I went on ESPN.com to the NFL link where they have scouting reports for each NFL player from Scouts, Inc. In addition to the report they assign a grade to a player with 100 representing a perfect player with no weaknesses. Players assigned grades in the 90's are the absolute elite. So I took the grades for our starting offensive line and Pittsburgh's starters and averaged them along with their ages and this is what I found.

         age      grade
Adams    30        85
Kosier   27        69
Johnson  27        70
Rivera   34        77
Fabini   31        75

Average  29.8      75.2

Smith    27        75
Faneca   27        81
Hartings 33        75
Simmons  27        71
Starks   24        68

Average  28.0      74.0

So as you can see, compared to one of the best offensive lines in the NFL, ours grades out actually better in the eyes of some scouts and isn't that much older. So maybe, just maybe, the worry over the O line is premature and maybe we should just be optimistic that our line plays as well as it was graded by Scouts, Inc. Who knows, maybe they will even play better. If they do, I see no reason why we shouldn't be playing in Miami in early Feburary, other than maybe a T.O. implosion.

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