this is a common thing these days

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max
I think so. There are no hard rules in the draft. Or at least I don't like limiting yourself to taking only a handful of positions at the top of the draft.

Actually the 97 draft produced 4 top LOTs.

Pace, Jones, Glenn, and Verba. 4 LOTs were taken in round 1 in 97 and all 4 were anywhere from solid hits to hall of famers.

All of those guys were ready as rookies. But then that was before the spread.

Compare that to the 1st round tackles taken from 2013-2015.

Fisher, Joeckel, Johnson, Fluker, Pugh, Robinson, Matthews, Lewan, James, Scherff, Flowers, Peat, Ogbuehi, Humphries.

Lot of guards on that list (drafted as LOTs). One little note: Ogbuehi is the guy who replaced Whitworth and presumably made Whitworth expendable. He's a disaster.

So why were so many guys bumped up into the first round who would not match up against Glenn and Verba as players, who were low first rounders?

Because the quality of college linemen has dropped so much, and assessing linemen is so iffy now (because of the spread), that they get inflated and taken higher than they should be. You have to swing and risk missing because there will be no one in lower rounds to choose from.

Rams fans like to act like Robinson is this big exception to OL drafting. No he isn't. He's a symptom of wider issues at the position.

Use to be that THE safest position to take in round 1 was OL. That's not true anymore. The hit percentage has dropped a lot in the last few years.


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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2017 06:28AM by zn.