Just wanted to vent a bit.
I find that when you start talking about sports talk radio, most casual sports fans, and they start talking about how a team is going to look in any given year, the focus is always on the skill players. It's NEVER on the line.
Maybe this is less true on defense, but usually on defense the only linemen they care about are those pass rushers that get lots of sacks. They don't care about the big NT that can tie up two blockers so that the linebackers can tackle downhill.
I can't stand this. The game begins with the guys up front. If you don't have talent there, if they're not doing their job, nothing else matters.
In 2000, Purdue had lightning in a bottle with Drew Brees, one of the best QB's in the game at any level. At the skill positions, however, he was surrounded by a bunch of guys who basically didn't even get a mention at the next level. But who did he have in front of him? A line where 4 of the five starters played multiple years in the NFL, and have 8 super bowl rings between them. Including Matt Light, who went to three Pro Bowls because he was so good at protecting Tom Brady's blind side. But who gets the credit? The QB.
Look at the Wisconsin blueprint. Get a bunch of sausage-fed road-graders and let them grind defenses into dust. Now, the Badgers have had some really talented tailbacks during this time, but even the "meh" talents were easily 1,000 yard backs behind those offensive lines. Heck, if you never get touched until you're 4 yards past the LOS, all you need to do is fall forward and you're going to keep drives moving. But who gets the credit? The RB.
I understand. Most football watchers don't have the ability to really watch the lines and understand how important they are. It's tough to identify who the "stars" are when you have 5 players there instead of one QB or RB. And of course, those guys don't put up any statistics.
But those guys deserve more attention. You take a serviceable QB and RB and put them behind a great line, and you have a pretty good shot at having a good offense. Sure, maybe the QB is a "game manager", any manager will tell you that it's easy to manage guys who do their jobs well. You take a stellar QB and RB and you put them behind Purdue's OL over the last few years? They're toast. No time to throw and no holes to run through.
I wish some of these pundits and sportswriters would spend less time talking about the turnover at the skill position and tell us more about how a team's OL or DL is looking going into the season. Because that gives us more information about how the skill guys will perform than those skill guys' recruiting star rankings.