Thiry tweet today regarding Rams OC options. Maybe if....

Quote
Rams43
Like it or not, believe it or not, here it is, anyway.

Lindsey Thiry
@LindseyThiry
Sean McVay says Brian Allen and Coleman Shelton are candidates to take over at center and adds that they have some guards who are capable of flexing positions.
3:39 PM · Apr 27, 2021

I ruled out the Rams drafting a rookie "center" a month ago.

Snead is due to stay put and actually make a Rams first pick in the draft without trading down.

The odds are still favored for him trading back to add an extra draft pick.

I doubt a ton of educated Rams fans would be surprised if Snead and McVay finally took a different approach this year.

They're due to not trade down for an extra pick but the it still feels like they will continue their normal trend.

If they're both in agreement and sold on selecting one of their top 2 rated center prospects, I wouldn't be stunned.

I'm not a rookie center draft guru but I do like 2 centers in this draft.

I would be okay if they selected either one of them even though I'm still doubting center will be their first selection.

Creed Humphrey (Oklahoma) | 6'5/312

Humphrey, the son of three-time Division II All-American wrestler Chad Humphrey, was a three-year starter in Norman that earned Freshman All-American honors in 2018 while helping the Sooners win the Joe Moore Award as the country’s top offensive line.

In Humphrey's swan song as a redshirt junior in 2020, he earned third-team All-American honors (his second-straight All-America accommodations) and won the Big 12 Offensive Lineman of the Year award (one year after being named co-winner of the award).

Like his father, Humphrey grew up wrestling. Creed finished as Oklahoma’s state runner-up in the heavyweight division as a high school junior. He gave up wrestling to turn his attention full-time to football in college. Following a redshirt season, Humphrey became the fulcrum of Lincoln Riley’s high-powered attack at the pivot.

There, you could see the skills that made Humphrey a wrestling star. A grizzly-strong grappler that latches on and doesn’t let go, Humphrey is also a whip-smart player that was in charge of line calls at OU. He was a two-time captain that drew work-ethic and leadership raves from coaches and teammates.

Humphrey finished as a top-10 graded PFF center in two of his three starting campaigns. His off-year, a snakebitten 2019 campaign, started by missing all of spring practice with a hand injury and ended early with a knee injury.

Humphrey plays with unmistakable intensity, but within himself and in control, with technical acumen you have to work hundreds of hours on the field and hundreds of hours off it in the film room to achieve. In the run game, Humphrey’s main objectives are arriving with force and winning position early to seal his opponent from the play-side of the field.

Humphrey is not a mauler that drives nose tackles 10 yards backwards, but he’s proved adept at erasing his man from the play by getting him turned such so that he's going to have to break free of Humphrey's Gorilla Glue grip and fight across Humphrey's helmet to have any shot at the ball-carrier, by which point the ball-carrier is long-gone.

Humphrey is effective in the second-level for similar reasons, erasing pursuit angles by winning early position. Humphrey’s vice-grip hands, no doubt honed over years on the wrestling mat, come in handy in pass-pro, where he throws mean hands but doesn’t over-extend.

Opponents can get into Humphrey's pads and move him back a little -- this is where Humphrey’s lack of reach comes in -- but Humphrey’s ability to drop his anchor and stand his ground in a grappling match, ala his wrestling days, make him difficult to easily shed even in cases he's entered deep waters.

Over 1,297 career pass-pro reps in OU’s pass-happy system -- spanning the starting seasons of Kyler Murray, Jalen Hurts and Spencer Rattler -- Humphrey never gave up even one singular sack. But physically gifted interior players like Quinnen Williams and Bravvion Roy gave him fits, because a bit of hip stiffness causes Humphrey to play high.

Humphrey isn’t limited as an athlete -- he proved as much at his pro day workout. Humphrey tested as the most-athletic center to enter the league since 1987, according to Kent Lee Platte’s RAS system. Humphrey posted top-50 size-adjusted historical tests at his position in the 20-yard split (2.9), vertical (33 inches), broad jump (112 inches), short shuttle (4.49) and 3-cone (7.5).

Humphrey will likely need a little help in cases where his technique, strength and brains can’t compensate for a physical disadvantage. Fortunately, those instances are rare, and Humphrey is, in general, an extremely reliable pivot.

I’m not sure that he’s physically gifted enough to become an All-Pro, but Creed Humphrey is going to start from Day 1 and be a mainstay in NFL starting lineups for the next decade as an above-average starter.

Quinn Meinerz (Wisconsin-Whitewater) | 6'3/320

Meinerz has had arguable the most dominant pre-draft process of any prospect in the 2021 NFL Draft to catapult from little-known D-III guard to Day 2 hopeful. The ascendence is all the more incredible considering Meinerz, a first-team D-III All-American in 2019, started for only two years at UW-Whitewater and had his 2020 season canceled due to COVID-19 concerns.

Meinerz’s magical run began at the Senior Bowl (credit Jim Nagy and his staff for the find). Meinerz spent that week dominating big-name Power 5 defensive linemen one-on-one in drills, earning the Senior Bowl’s offensive lineman of the week award for his squad and drawing superlatives from NFL draft scouts in attendance.

Incredibly, Meinerz competed through a broken hand that week. This was no surprise to those that knew him. The toughness speaks for itself. But it was Meinerz’s drive to excel that was evoked for me in Mobile. After Meinerz’s 2020 season was canceled, if you would have polled 100 NFL scouts, I bet half or less would have predicted Meinerz gets drafted.

Meinerz could have spent the fall feeling sorry for himself, assuming he was going to be bypassed by the large all-star games and overlooked by the NFL. Instead, he worked out like a banshee. Meinerz's Chris McCandless-meets-Heavyweights-meets-McGyver workout regimen is the stuff of folklore. Every summer, when UW-Whitewater’s spring tests concluded, Meinerz would drive into the Canadian wilderness to his uncle Tim Meinerz's fishing camp in Alberta.

There, Meinerz would split his time working at the camp and working out with any supplies that happened to be lying around. Trees became defensive linemen, piles of wood became squatting weights, and giant gas cans became his running weights.

Meinerz started training to become a center in his backyard in Wisconsin during his off-time over the past year, because, as he told Nate Burleson on Good Morning Football, he believed showing the NFL more versatility would increase his odds of making it.

So Meinerz jerry-rigged a pizza paddle to a garbage can and tried to hit the skinny part of the paddle flush with his shotgun snaps. If he missed the can, he had to run further to retrieve the ball. He taped himself doing this and then studied the tape for hours to hone his accuracy.

Meinerz was called a “Senior Bowl Riser” by everyone that wrote such a column. He entered his pro day workout not as an unknown curiosity, but as arguably the draft’s biggest riser. This was a new position for Quinn Meinerz.

The media showed up knowing who he was, specifically to watch him and speak with him. With all 32 NFL teams on hand, including high-level decision-makers like Washington GM Marty Hurney and San Francisco 49ers assistant director of college scouting Tariq Ahmad, Meinerz put on a show, submitting a RAS athletic profile that ranked No. 2 among all centers since 1987 (only the aforementioned Creed Humphrey tested better).

Meinerz’s showings in the 40 (4.99), 20-yard split (2.88), vertical (32 inches) and broad jump (9-feet-3-inches) ranked top-35 all-time size-adjusted among centers in the RAS system. Meinerz’s workout may have been even more impressive if he hadn’t had to pull out of the bench press due to his broken hand.

Meinerz is a low-firing, explosive, downhill run-blocker. He hits his target flush, latching his vicious hooks in, and his leg drive from there could be shown in offensive line seminars (why do you think Meinerz ran around the Canadian wilderness with those jugs of gasoline every summer?). Meinerz is one of those linemen who takes it personally if his man ends a run-block rep on his feet.

Meinerz mostly got by on size, athleticism and powerful, active hands in pass-pro in college. That was enough. It was nice to see in Mobile that, technically speaking, Meinerz appeared to have ironed out some sloppiness with his footwork at Whitewater that led to some unnecessary balance issues on tape.

Continued fine-tuning of Meinerz's footwork and sets are going to make it difficult to beat him with speed and counters at the next level. We already know that it’s going to be rare to see this former wrestler beaten by power.

He may be jumping up three levels of football, but Quinn Meinerz arrives in the NFL with grown-man strength, freak athleticism he worked doggedly for, and an insatiable desire to improve that, especially to concerned camp-goers in rural Alberta the past few summers, borders on maniacal.

Players with this much skill, physical talent and desire don’t fail. Round 2 prospect for me.
[www.nbcsports.com]







Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/27/2021 03:45PM by Florida_Ram.