The offensive line is the easiest target in football when it comes to who to blame when you’re not putting points on the board. That only gets worse when a quarterback is getting sacked and sustaining injury like Cam Newton did on Thursday night against the New England Patriots. But, just because a group is easy to target, doesn’t make it right. The average football fan doesn’t really fully understand the minutia of O-line play, and why would they? Everything else in football has a trackable positive stat, the only things that people track for linemen are hurries and sacks.
Of course, concepts like pressure and hurries are opinion based, sacks are not. Ultimately when you see Cam Newton played a quarter of action, and took two sacks plus left the game with injury, naturally you would say his line didn’t hold up if you weren’t paying close attention. Lucky for you all, you know I pay close attention so you don’t have to.
The offensive line played exactly zero role in either sack on Cam Newton on Thursday. They were responsible for one sack on Kyle Allen, when Matt Paradis got beat and the pocket collapsed.
The first sack on Newton occured when Kyle Van Noy appeared to jump the snap count and fly right by a slow reacting Chris Manhertz. The second sack was on a six man rush, that had the play been successful would have been touted as a textbook blitz pickup by the five down linemen and running back Christian McCaffrey. Instead, receivers didn’t uncover, and Cam Newton couldn’t find a running lane or a good throwaway target... so eventually they got there for the sack.
But yet... here is #Panthers Twitter:
Panthers offensive line: pic.twitter.com/TJfLQ8CTTL
— Ariana Venti (@nice_hairdo) August 23, 2019
Am I thrilled with the offensive line’s “dress rehearsal” on Thursday? Absolutely not. But I cannot stress hard enough that the preseason never has, and never will, mean anything when it comes to the regular season. Do you think the Patriots are really any happier at the moment with their showing? Can’t imagine so, but do you think the Patriots are going to be good once again this year? I’m sure you do.
With that in mind, I encourage you to watch the preseason for what it is... a taste of actual football, albeit a not so satisfying one. It’s going to be awhile until we can reasonably say whether this line is going to hold up or not, especially since the Rams and Aaron Donald are going to be an incredibly hard first test, but all will be revealed in time.